The Bridge Between You and Me

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

— Mary Oliver

I was wondering… what makes anything - or anyone - hold?

The same force that steadies a bridge, perhaps: the tension that lives between strength and surrender.Trust works in much the same way. It asks us to open, but not dissolve - to be porous enough for connection, yet strong enough to stay whole.

For many of us, the world we’ve lived and led in has shaped our instincts in the opposite direction. We’ve been taught - by the pace, the pressure, the systems we’ve inherited - to fortify. We’ve been trained to keep things ordered: to plan, to predict, to contain the unknown.

These reflexes once made sense - in a time when stability was the measure of success, when predictability meant progress, and control felt like care. But that world is changing. We are leading through an age of transition - marked by polarisation, eroding trust, and the fatigue of constant meaningless connection. Technology mediates more of our relationships; certainty is harder to find. And when everything feels unsteady, our instinct is to grip tighter - as if control itself could keep us safe.

But walls, while they protect, also isolate. The tighter we grip, the more the world around us slips from reach. And in trying to stay safe, we lose the very relationships that hold us steady. What’s needed now is something far more subtle - boundaries that breathe.

In Knowledge Mindfulness, we call this porosity with integrity - the capacity to let emotional and intellectual information flow through us without being flooded by it. Like the surface of living skin or coral, it’s not the absence of boundaries, but their evolution - from walls that divide to membranes that discern.

Because true trust isn’t built by removing distance, but by learning to hold it wisely. In leadership, this kind of discernment becomes essential. Without it, empathy can collapse into overwhelm, and clarity can harden into control. Porosity with integrity asks something subtler of us - to stay open enough to be moved, yet centred enough not to be swept away.

We see it in the smallest human gestures: when someone listens without rushing to fix; when a leader can stand in uncertainty without losing their centre; when a conversation can hold difference without breaking its thread. Trust lives here - in the tension between form and flow.

When I was a child, an elder I admired once asked me to help water the plants in the courtyard. I was small and impatient, splashing water everywhere. He didn’t scold or fix my mistakes. Instead, he turned the watering can slightly toward me, so we held it together. Our hands moved in rhythm - his steady, mine learning. Only later did I realise he was teaching me about trust - that it doesn’t come from control, but from invitation; from letting someone share the weight with you.

That moment returns to me often - especially when I’m with teams finding their balance through uncertainty. Because what builds bridges between people isn’t sameness, but recognition - the ability to remain fully ourselves while staying open to another’s truth. It’s not agreement that holds us together, but the willingness to keep crossing toward each other.

Yet this balance is easily lost. Too much openness, and we blur at the edges - feeling everything, but holding little. Too much control, and we harden - mistaking distance for clarity, and composure for strength. The art lies somewhere in between: grounded enough to stand firm, open enough to truly listen.

Trust, then, is not static. It’s a living structure - one that flexes with tension, expands with care, and strengthens through use. Every conversation, every decision, every act of attention either repairs or weakens its cables. And like a bridge, it must be tended - not through declaration, but through design: through the consistency of how we show up, the integrity of our follow-through, the courage to remain open even when uncertainty presses hard against us.

In an age of fragmentation - political, digital, emotional - perhaps the most radical act of leadership is to keep building bridges, not walls. In a world raising higher towers and deeper divides, the bridge becomes an act of quiet defiance - an insistence on connection. To listen, not to reply, but to understand. To hold form without rigidity, and openness without erosion.

This is where Knowledge Mindfulness becomes essential.

It invites leaders to see trust not as a feeling only, but as a disciplined practice - a way of being that balances permeability with presence, and strength with care.

It asks leaders to:

• Hold form without hardening. Boundaries are not barriers; they are the scaffolds that make connection safe. Let your structure invite, not exclude.
• Listen beyond agreement. Trust grows when we can hear what we don’t yet understand. Listen not to reply, but to reveal what’s true between.
• Stay porous to difference. Let perspectives flow through you - not to blur your shape, but to expand your sight. Curiosity is the bridge that keeps learning alive.
• Repair what weakens. Bridges erode through neglect, not conflict. Attend to the small fractures early - the missed acknowledgements, the unspoken hurts.
• Keep walking across. The bridge is never finished. Trust, like leadership, is a continual act of crossing - between me and you, self and other, knowing and being.

To lead, then, is to keep crossing - again and again - not to prove our strength, but to renew our trust in what connects us.