The Tables We Remember

“Sometimes belonging begins with an empty chair and someone saying, sit with us.”

Delphi Lodge, Connemara, Ireland

I've been thinking about tables lately.

Not beautiful tables, necessarily. Not perfectly set ones. The tables where something happens simply because people sit down together.

Growing up, gathering around a table mattered. My mother knew how to welcome people. She could make steak, baked potatoes and green beans and somehow the meal wasn't really about the steak, baked potatoes or green beans. It was about who was there.

Years later, traveling alone in Ireland, I found myself sitting at long tables with people I didn't know. I had seen that table pictured on the website of the establishment. I known of this place for years, it featured fly fishing on private waters on a gorgeous Loch and the river below it. It is stewarded by caring and diligent people who I would later learn go to herculean lengths to preserve it. I knew I wanted to go there but once I saw that table I knew I had to go there.

People came from different places. We had different lives and different stories.

We ate. We talked. We learned about one another. We talked about where we'd been that day and where we might go tomorrow.

For a little while, strangers weren't strangers anymore.

I remember looking at one of those long tables and thinking: This.

This is what I want.

Not networking. Not performing. Not needing to explain who you are or what you've accomplished before you're worthy of a chair.

Just a place where you can arrive and there is room.

I've spent a lot of my life traveling and moving, sometimes by choice and sometimes because life required it. I've learned that belonging isn't necessarily created by knowing someone for twenty years. Sometimes it happens over dinner with someone you met twenty minutes ago.

Maybe that's why the table has stayed with me.

And maybe that's what I've been trying to build all along.

A place to gather.

A place to connect.

A place where nobody has to wonder whether there is room for them.

There’s Always Room At The Table.