Bruce Feiler

And I think that that's a great point.

On the other hand, if it's entirely an old ritual, like in her case, the one that she went to where she said, I went to a three day wedding when I married, this is an Indian woman marrying an Indian man.

And she said it was traditional, but my husband had an LGBTQ brother,

I was estranged from my father, and in some ways it didn't really suit us.

So the most successful ritual designers that I know, even the people in organized religion are what I call ritual entrepreneurs.

They're realizing that they have to adjust.

Well, I would say a few things.

I would say that the first and most important thing is be a group keeper, okay?

I belong to the tribe of group keepers, okay?

I'm the one who runs the Backyard Olympics.

I'm the one who leads the dinner, you know, the family dinner game.

I run the family meeting.

I'm the keeper of the family stories.

This is how you and I first met with Secrets of Happy Families and Life is in the Transition.

So like I'm the group keeper and every group and every family has one or more than one.

And so I think that we all need to be group keepers.

We spend so much time talking about self-care, taking care of our own needs.

But there need to be people that focus on taking care of the group.

And so I would say lesson number one here is be a group keeper.

If you add together the births, deaths, graduations, marriages, cancer diagnoses, lost jobs, and retirements in the United States every year, the number is 50 million.