My night in Gloria Steinem's living room was the ultimate gift

The walls glowed with marigold wallpaper, the room ornate and lived-in. Its history was everywhere: picture frames lined the walls, carved edges traced the mahogany armoire, objects collected over a lifetime. Some, I imagined, chosen on the road; others given along the way. I was sitting in Gloria Steinem's living room, at what would become the last gathering of journalists she hosted before she passed away at 92. For the past year, I had brought journalists together every month – truth-tellers across generations and mediums – as journalism was changing and the work felt more necessary than ever. We shared a devotion to the craft, a responsibility to tell the truth and a belief that this moment required us to care for each other, and reimagine a way forward. I hadn't always known how to tend to a room like this. As a child, my circle of friends was small. I was a friendly kid, but with my dark skin and dark eyes in a mostly White place, I often felt like I didn't belong. When I moved to New York City and into the corporate world, that loneliness took another shape: a culture where everyone wanted to be right, few stopped to listen and people got hurt in the race to get ahead. Move faster. Speak louder. Prove your worth. Win or lose. Somewhere in my belly, I knew this wasn't how we were meant to be with one another. Gloria Steinem's 'My Life on the Road' changed my own So I pushed back against what felt unjust. Over time, I found myself burning out, frustrated that after all that pushing, so little seemed to change. It became clear that what we were up against was too big to take on alone. By 2016, the country felt like it was pulling apart, and I was scraped raw trying to change it. I was growing cynical, beginning to lose faith that anything we did could make a difference. Then one day, in a secondhand bookstore near my Brooklyn apartment, I found a weathered copy of Gloria's "My Life on the Road." It felt like the book had been dropped into my hands just when I needed it. Her words met me: "If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye." I realized I had long seen change as something we had to push toward, fight for, win. Gloria gave me a counteroffer: our power could be found in one another. Perhaps change could begin by slowing down and sitting down. By listening to each other's truths and making it safe to tell them. One of Steinem's most lasting legacies: Listening Her words inspired me to organize my first talking circle with friends – to name what frustrated us about the world and ask what might be possible instead. Soon, women were gathering in living rooms across the country, making sense of the world through one another and bringing what we carried. I watched our power multiply in relationship – expanding what we could do and imagine. Over the next decade, gathering became a kind of love practice. I would go on to facilitate more than a hundred talking circles, carrying what I learned in those rooms into how I moved through the world. Gloria helped me understand that gathering was more than bringing people into a room, pouring drinks and passing snacks. It was a way of reorienting ourselves toward one another: making room to arrive as we are, listening for what we might not yet understand, allowing ourselves to be changed by what we might hear, noticing who is beside us – and who is still at the edges. Because the world so often asks the opposite of us: to sort ourselves into right and wrong, good and bad, us and them, narrowing our sense of who belongs to one another – and what we might make together. Gloria taught me that if we want to change the world, we have to practice what we want to become. I couldn't have known, finding that weathered book, that ten years later I would find myself in Gloria's living room, leading her and the journalists gathered there in a talking circle. Back in that marigold room, I began our circle as I often did, with a guided meditation. I remember looking over at Gloria. Her eyes were closed. Her face was peaceful, at ease in the intimacy of the room. I thought about all the circles she had sat in, all the people she had listened to across a lifetime. And there she was. The woman whose words had helped me understand the power of the circle, sitting inside one I had made. What a gift, to have that evening with her. To have sat together, eyes closed, practicing for a little while the world we hoped to make. Adrianne Wright is the founder and CEO of Rosie, a storytelling agency for nonprofits. She is also the cofounder of I Will Not Be Quiet, a national community group that brings women together in intimate talking circles. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: My night in Gloria Steinem's living room was the ultimate gift | Opinion Reporting by Adrianne Wright, Opinion contributor / USA TODAY USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect