“You can’t not say anything.”

“You can’t not say anything.”

That’s what my old friend Chris said to me.

Chris and I hadn’t seen each other in nearly a decade. He advises CEOs around the world. I coach them. We caught up one morning over video—talking, reflecting, comparing notes from the front lines of leadership these last ten years.

We spoke about the pandemic.

About reckoning.

About the cries for justice rising up in the streets and boardrooms alike.

About how the job of leading has changed.

I asked him, “What do you tell your folks now?”

He replied, “I say, ‘You can’t not say anything.’”

Exactly right, I thought.

A week earlier I was at NYU Stern’s Initiative on Purpose & Flourishing in a fireside-style conversation (sans fire), and the moderator asked me to reflect on whether it’s possible to scale purpose in an organization.

“I’ll get to that,” I said. “But first, I need to say something.”

I needed to name the moment we’re all in.

To acknowledge what too often goes unspoken in rooms like that one.

“Regardless of where you stand politically or ideologically,” I said, “half the world feels endangered right now. Half the world feels like they’re losing their place, their belonging.”

There was a pause.

Then an exhale.

You could feel the room settle.

To speak of purpose and flourishing while so many feel their very mattering—as the thoughtful Zach Mercurio would say—is being threatened, requires us to reconcile a deep tension. We must hold the dissonance between corporate aspiration and collective ache.

The conversation that followed was honest and generous. I was told it felt reassuring. I hope it was. And what flowed was an honest, and ultimately reassuring, sharing of the struggles of those in the room. And the sharing resulted in people finding kinship, and realizing they are not alone. In times such as these, knowing we are not alone is a balm we all need. But what made it so wasn’t my eloquence. It was the willingness to say something. To name the elephant in the room—the fear, the grief, the isolation, the fragile hope.

A few weeks later, another gathering.

This time at the University of Virginia, for the launch of the Contemplative Sciences Center.

I was part of a panel on “Compassion and Contemplation in Leadership,” alongside UVA’s Ian H. Solomon, Roshi Joan Halifax of Upaya Zen Center, and Dr. Flávia Maia, a climate activist and speaker.

And once again, I couldn’t not say something.

“How can we talk about compassion in leadership,” I asked, “without naming the war on empathy?”

That very day, people had taken to the streets again—expressing anguish, rage, sorrow.

I turned to the wisdom of Parker J. Palmer, who reminds us that:

“Violence is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.”

Violence to ourselves, I always add, violence to the planet, and violence to others. Indeed, we are living in violent times.

And what should we do with suffering?

We meet it. With presence. With truth. With compassion.

We say something.

Even if our voice shakes.

Roshi Joan invited those in the room to turn to one another and share their experience. To be with each other in the unspoken. That small act—facilitating collective presence—was an act of redemptive leadership. Because saying something doesn’t always mean saying a lot. Sometimes it means making space for what’s hard to say.

As I wrote in Reunion:

“Silence, in the face of injustice, is complicity. But silence, in the face of suffering, can also be cruelty.”

This isn’t about politics. It’s about humanity.

Elie Wiesel once wrote:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides… Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

What’s required of leaders now—truly, what’s required of all of us—is to resist the anesthesia of neutrality. To choose empathy over indifference. Voice over avoidance.

As Wendell Berry put it:

“We are now reduced to one significant choice…,” he wrote in The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“… We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. This will never be presented to us as one large and final choice, but only as a succession of small choices, continuing to the seventh and the seven-hundredth generation. Because we have not forgotten all of our true heritage or lost all of its records, signs, and relics, we can begin to imagine how this would be. By a long persistence of human choosing, not of human life but of the world’s life, which is both its and ours, everything would be changed: how we would live, how we would live together, how we would earn our living, how we would work. If we worked for the world’s life, in good faith, with sufficient love, and knowing how, our work would become good. It would become beautiful. It would make us happy, and not with the future happiness of political promising. It would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.”

Redemptive leadership, as I’ve been exploring it, is about just this:

Making those small choices.

Not once. But again and again. And again.

To speak when it would be easier to stay silent.

To name what aches.

To give shape to the unsaid, so that others may feel seen, not alone.

It is an act of courage. And, perhaps more importantly, an act of love.

So what do we do now?

We keep choosing.

We keep speaking.

We keep leading—not from invincibility, but from integrity.

Because you can’t not say anything.

Not now. Not anymore.