Author: Gianpiero Petriglieri

Up until two days ago, heartbreak at the Boston marathon was confined to a hill in Newton. It was heartbreak of a glorious kind, a half-mile ascent 20 miles into the course where fatigue transforms effort into epic.

For runners, ‘heartbreak hill’ is a legendary stretch of asphalt, an Olympus for the best among the rest of us, who never made the Olympics but remain devoted to the open road.

The hill is a challenge and a privilege. You need to earn your chance to suffer through it. (Qualifying to run the Boston marathon is a major athletic accomplishment in itself.)

Out there, effort shatters the fictional divide between mind and body and strips off pretenses, leaving you alone with your self yet deeply connected with fellow runners and people come to cheer friends and strangers alike.

“It nearly killed me,” racers will say afterwards, meaning it made them feel alive.

If only all heartbreak could be like that. Chosen, planned for, limited, communal, revealing, full of meaning. With infinite potential, once past, to become a cherished memory that enriches its owner’s unique story.

Oh so different from that other kind.

The kind we never choose or expect but are forced to endure. The kind whose memory we’d rather do without but keeps us trapped in a perpetual present until we make at least some sense of it. The heartbreak of trauma. The kind that suddenly clogs the coronaries of a city on a festive Monday afternoon leaving it gasping for meaning, in pain and fear.

I was online when the explosions happened. In the first video I saw, runners were crossing the finish line. The clock timed them at just over 4 hours. The time it took my wife to run the London marathon, I thought. A second after the detonation, many were running the other way, towards the blast site to help — perhaps at the risk of their own lives. I wondered if I would have such courage. Both thoughts were more bearable expressions, I suspect, of a simpler feeling.

This could be us.

We spent a year in Boston recently. It was a city I had always liked, but it was running through it that let me fall in love. I often ran on my own, but I was never alone. Whenever I went out, whatever the weather, there was always another runner out there — if not a crowd of them. The spirit of the marathon, welcoming runners’ convivial solitude, lingered year-round on the banks of the Charles.

If pure meritocracy does not exist in the real world, the marathon is at least a close approximation. You need little fortune, facilities and gear to run far, fast. The rest is talent, focus and hard work. It is more than a hopeful existential metaphor, a marathon. More than a celebration. It is a strenuous affirmation of human determination, endurance and community.

The talk of senseless tragedy will soon give way to the cobbling together of reasons. As if such barbaric gestures are ever anything but the absence, the hatred, of reason — and of love.

We’ll mourn the victims in public and private ways, and celebrate the heroes. Debates about appropriate responses will mark the return of familiar politics. We’ll praise or condemn leaders’ reactions and draw lessons for corporate crises.

Some may call those responses rehearsed, even futile. They are anything but. We’ll do all that and more because we need to. We need it to begin restoring faith that tragedy and death are not always maybe just an inch away, hidden from sight only by good fortune and the fabric of illusions.

It is our willingness to seek the glorious heartbreak of challenging our limits that makes us stronger. It is our ability to work through the heartbreak of trauma that makes us more resilient. Both take courage and make us who we are.

On our last day in the city, we entered the 10K race organized by the Boston Athletic Association, the same group that puts on the Boston marathon. It was, in comparison, a small event with its 6,000 runners. The course ran parallel to the marathon’s last miles, two blocks north. It was a glorious morning, the best possible goodbye.

The children asked their babysitter to take them to watch. I can still see them cheering from the roadside a hundred yards or so from the finish line, hear them giggle emptying water bottles on my head as I sat on the pavement recovering.

We watched Jennifer finish and took pictures and played and stretched and feasted on free snacks. Without having to think even for a moment how big and tenuous a blessing it is to be together, safe.

After an accident, there is often a second of calm when you realize that you are seriously hurt. Memory captures the scene in fine detail, as if you’re hovering outside your skin, before pain and confusion pull you right back in.

I can still see myself getting up from a fall, almost exactly thirteen years ago, dusting snow off my tingling left arm. It looks odd, no longer in its usual place. I am somewhere between medical school and settling into my residency, before I could even imagine working in a school of business.

That winter, for a moment, the idea of becoming a ski instructor had turned into more than a fantasy. I had been training with a group of aspiring instructors and was flirting with that job, so to speak, while in a complicated relationship with medicine. It was very romantic. I would say torrid if we weren’t talking snow.

I have always loved skiing. I love the anticipation of watching snow fall late at night, counting the hours until the lifts reopen. I love the crackling of boots on packed snow. The loud click of bindings. The whisper of smooth turns. The vast quiet. The burning tickle of inhaling cold, clean air and snowflakes on a powder run. I love the solitude and conviviality of skiing. The restoring exhaustion. The mountains are the places where I have felt freest, happiest, most at peace.

I was a solid amateur, not nearly good enough to be an instructor. I would not know, however, if I could have reached that bar until I had skied full time for a season or two. The only way to find out was to put my “real job” on hold.

I think about that winter every time a student, a colleague, a friend confide that they’re wrestling with the temptation to change jobs, take time off, go back to school, make a commitment. Will I enjoy it? they wonder, Will it be worth it?

It wasn’t the time or money I had invested in medical training that made me hesitate. Neither was it the fear of pursuing an unconventional career. There are many physicians who are also ski instructors. Many more than are also, say, management professors.

I was prepared to offer devotion and make sacrifices. I have never believed work would be rewarding without both.

My concern was spoiling the passion I felt for skiing by turning it into a job.

When we’re lost in the space between potential futures, it seems, we can’t help but torment ourselves with impossible questions. Our ruminations tend to focus on what we are missing, what we may or may not get, or what we fear giving up.

These days those sentiments go by the popular acronym FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out.” Back then we called it escapism. Most of us make sense of it as either cue or cowardice — either a healthy reminder to look beyond our current horizon, or a neurotic fear of commitment because there may be something better elsewhere.

Once we reduce those feelings to a binary choice, however, we become too focused on yearning and too little on learning. The preoccupation with picking the right future — whether to follow or forget the temptation to make a change — obscures the question of what the temptation may be trying to teach us.

It is often when we yearn for an answer that we stand to learn the most from staying with the question. It is neither resolution nor fulfillment that we long for in those moments, I suspect. It is desire. (We remain suspended because desire feeds on distance and possibility). If we can’t figure out which option is better then it may be worth examining what those options mean to us.

My recollection of life after that fateful fall is organized not by hours, days, or months, but by different kinds of pain. The stabbing from the muscles pulling the split bone in my shoulder apart. The dull burning after the surgery that screwed it back together. The welcome sting of painkiller injections. The strain and jolts of physical therapy and the diffuse, sticky pain of feeling trapped.

Nothing makes one focus on meaning quite like hurting. It is as if pain cracks the shell of a place in our hearts where we know what we need to do and why.

I spent those months revisiting my relationship with work — the place it had in my life, what I hoped to experience, what I was prepared to give.

While I had prided myself on my work-life balance, I realized, it was never work that made me feel alive. I had that version of work-life balance that resembles a frosty marriage — built on habit, convenience and reciprocal need. Skiing was refuge, restoration and escape. Work was ambition, duty and service. By keeping them apart, I was never fully present in either.

I didn’t want work to take over my life. But I was not content for it to just fund my life, either. I wanted work that conjured passion and devotion. That made me serve and learn. That reflected who I am and brought me close to interesting people. That exhausted and restored me and excited me and scared me and kept me on edge the way skiing did at times. No job would do that for me. I had to work that way. A job could at best encourage me — literally, help me sustain the courage — to do it.

It was then that I learned that in any job, the meaningful moments are like mornings of fresh powder and blue sky — few, far between, and all the more enjoyable the more prepared you are. So we better choose work, to the extent we can, where those moments of bliss are worth the effort it takes to be present and ready for them.

In the best cases, the effort itself feels valuable often enough. But even when it doesn’t, we can still tell that our work is meaningful if between its moments of bliss we are more often frustrated than bored.

I’ll never know if I could have become a ski instructor, or what life would be like if I had. That version of me rests somewhere in my psyche, among what Rice University Professor Otilia Obodaru calls our “alternative selves.” It wakes up from time to time, as these selves do, mumbling “what if…”

For all the value we put on plans and pursuits, what makes us who we are is often what we do with life’s surprises. Temptations don’t always point to what we really want, but often hint towards who we are trying to become. Maturity is not the ability to pursue or suppress them. It is the ability to take them seriously without always taking them literally.

I needed that break, it turns out. I had thought I needed to move on, but it was getting stuck that helped me grow.

By the time I was back on a mountain, I had begun the transition that led me, through years of uncertainty, to what I do and who I am today.

This month, I’ll be teaching my children to ski.

I have a picture somewhere of my son and me playing in the living room the day of Barack Obama’s first inauguration as 44th President of the United States. My son was five months old, the ceremony on the TV behind us. I had left work early to watch it. That night, we wrote about it in his baby book.

It was impossible, even from afar, not to feel the enchantment of that moment, not to grasp its historical significance.

Two months earlier, the morning after Obama’s election, I had happened to be with a group of fellow leadership academics, a crowd that maintains an affectation of skeptical detachment for all manifestations of unbridled hope in charismatic leaders. (Humans always fall for it. It never ends well.) One, rather out of character, shared that he had cried.

It will be different, this time around.

The National Mall will be less crowded and the hope in many hearts no longer of the unbridled kind. Less of a new dawn, more like a second chance. (This, I have argued elsewhere, may be a good thing.) While its significance may be different, however, Obama’s second inauguration will be just as meaningful. Because the ceremony, first and foremost, is not about him.

It is about us.

Public rituals often mark the transition of individuals into, or out of, significant roles and life stages. In doing so, they serve a crucial function for a community at large, affirming its ability to renew itself. Far more than displays of vanity and mass celebrations, rituals keep culture alive. They put people into culture and culture into people. This is why uprooted or oppressed communities go to great pains to preserve their rituals. When rituals disappear their culture goes with them.

Humans have always gathered to perform rituals that tie leaders to their communities and vice versa. Rituals help craft a tie made of belonging without possession, the kind of bond where each side gives the other permission to change them for good. Leaders use rituals to infuse their communities with meaning — to signal what matters, who we are, what we must do and why. Communities use rituals to demand leaders’ allegiance — to signal what norms they must conform to, which principles they are to uphold, who they are meant to serve. Put another way, rituals are reminders that leaders are both shapers and custodians. It is their job to influence as much as it is to represent their people.

In days like this, it is hard not to wonder where those rituals are in business organizations today. In many, commitment and community have weakened. Loyalty has declined. Rituals have ceased to exist, or they don’t mean much. People may be freer and perhaps less gullible. But they are often also more isolated, connected without belonging. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in those same organizations the trust in leaders, and leaders’ ties to followers, are at their weakest. Rituals are cast as anachronisms or follies, rather than something that governs, binds, and reminds us that good leaders are stewards of a purpose and community, not the other way around.

Think of the inauguration again. On the one hand, the Obama administration — as every other before and after his — will use its power to shape the event. It has chosen speakers, singers, guests, words, and symbols that present its values, its identity, and its aspirations as those of the American people.

On the other hand, Obama will swear allegiance to the United States constitution — his hand on two bibles — Abraham Lincoln’s and Martin Luther King’s — with the same formula used by every US President since George Washington. He will be surrounded by representatives of military, political, legal, religious, and economic powers whom he will need as much as they need him, and sometimes more. And he will stand, as leaders always have, before a crowd. Them, his people. And he, theirs.

Obama, like Bush and Clinton before him, has also demonstrated a capacity for public introspection that we have come to expect of leaders — a performance of authenticity of sorts that turns leaders’ personal experience as a source of legitimacy in the eyes of those who resonate with it. When the boundary between person, work and role — who they are, what they do, and what others expect — is so thin, leaders are most inspired and inspiring. They feel and look “real,” committed, all in. It is also then that they are most vulnerable — to attacks, to losing their role, to becoming obsessed with success, to losing themselves. They are easier to love and easier to hate — depending less on how much we agree and more on how close we feel to them.

President Obama seems well aware of the opportunities and risk that lie at the boundary between him as a person and his role. Michael Lewis’s recent profile of his is a chronicle of the struggle to remain a human being while also fulfilling the duties of such a demanding, visible, and controversial leadership role. As many leaders these days, Obama is open about the desire, necessity or presumption — depending on how you see it — of having a life while attempting to lead.

“One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job,” he told Lewis, “is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you.” He continued, Lewis reports, “You have to filter stuff, but you can’t filter it so much you live in this fantasyland.”

As boundaries between private and public, person and role, become thinner for everybody and for leaders most of all, learning to remain present while exposed — somewhere between detached and overwhelmed — is vital to be well and to do well. Rituals help leaders do just that — show up fully and yet remember that even when you are at the center, it is not all about you.