keep your people. That is the whole practice. Everything else, the planners and the affirmations and the five a.m. routines, is scaffolding around this one small, enormous thing.

Mary Oliver once asked what could be more vital, more necessary, than clean water. And Fela answered her from across an ocean, in a song the whole world still sings: water no get enemy. Nothing alive can turn against the thing it cannot live without.

So the question rises like a spring. If water is that vital, that necessary, that free of enemies, how much more you? How much more the people who carry you?

What a Room Full of People Can Teach You

Yesterday we gathered to celebrate Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa on his seventieth birthday. Seventy years of teaching, of mentoring, of insisting that health begins in culture and culture begins in people. The room was full of the evidence: students he had taught, colleagues he had defended, friends he had kept.

And the lesson of the evening was as plain as water. People matter. Not networks, not followers, not contacts. People. The ones who show up. The ones who stay.

Ask the baby just born, opening its eyes for the first time and searching, before anything else, for a face. Ask the dirt poured over a coffin lowered into the earth. Between those two moments, the first opening and the last closing, is a life. And a life is measured by who was kept inside it.

The Daily Practice of Keeping People

Here is the art of living, and it is simple enough to begin today.

Each day, keep one person. Call the friend whose name has been sitting in your chest for a week. Thank the mentor before the milestone birthday, not at the memorial. Sit with the one who is grieving and do not rush to fix it. Notice the unique ones, the kind ones, the ones who bring light into the room, and tell them so while they can still hear you.

This is not networking. This is watering. You are tending the spring you will one day drink from, and the spring that will one day carry you home.

Storms will come. They always do. But people who practice keeping people do not weather storms alone. When the wind rises, they are surrounded. When the night is long, someone sits with them until the star appears.

Surround yourself with people. The positive ones, the unique ones, the kind ones. Do it daily, the way you drink water, without ceremony and without fail. And when your eyes close for the last time, may the dirt fall soft over you, so moving, so loving, because of everyone you kept.

Keep this.