So my guest today, Priya Parker, was born in Zimbabwe to a mom who came from India and a dad who came from South Dakota.
She spent the first chunk of her year kind of traveling across Africa and Asia as her parents worked together in fishing villages in various different places.
They eventually moved back to the US, ended up divorcing, then remarrying, and she found herself moving every two weeks between her mother's and father's households, toggling back and forth between what she describes as, in her words, a vegetarian, liberal, incense filled, buddhist, hindu, new age universe, and a meat eating, conservative, twice a week, church going, evangelical christian realm that set in motion a need to understand how to, to a certain extent, shapeshift, understand radically different social and familial dynamics and how to almost play the role of conflict resolver, peacemaker, and understander of different views, which eventually evolved to become her career path as she rose up and developed a career in conflict resolution, traveling to various places around the world and facilitating conversations, very often really hard, direct, necessary conversations that had in the wrong way can be monumentally destructive, but under her great care and guidance would turn into moments of deep and profound connection and awakening, and that became her career.
She has shared a lot of her ideas in a fascinating new book called the Art of Gathering, where we talk about this journey, we talk about her exposure to the early years and how when she ended up in university, her awareness really started to rise up and spurred a deeper interest in creating conversations and how her skillset has really become super useful in an environment today that is fraught and challenging and so in need of hard conversations.
We also come full circle to the concept of dinner parties, which sounds like it's kind of an aberration, but in fact, we have this great conversation about how to bring together people around dinner so that it's not just about entertainment, it's about having absolutely fantastic, deep, compelling, emotional, beautiful conversations through prompts and ideas.
And she offers up some really awesome prompts, too, that I'm about to use in some dinner gatherings soon.
And I'm excited to see how those conversations unfold.
Really excited to share this conversation with Priya.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
So my mother comes from kind of originally, Banaras, which is sort of, you know, one of the oldest cities in India.
And her father, who actually would have turned 100 today, he passed away about a few months ago.
Her father worked for the indian government, and so she and her four siblings traveled around India a lot.
And when it was time for her to kind of get married.
She decided she didn't want to or at least not didn't want to have an arranged marriage.
And she kind of secretly applied to graduate school in the US and got into a few places and at least in that generation, Virginia versus Iowa versus, you know, Minnesota, you sort of just.
You have no idea what is what, and you just say yes.
And she ended up at Iowa State University, begged her parents to let her go, and they allowed her to.
Was that unusual for sort of that moment in time?
It was unusual that she was a woman.
So the us immigration laws changed in 68 and allowed for.