Each year the FIM spotlights it's holiday performances and concerts at a free community open house we call Sneak Peek. This season we invite you to go behind the scenes as dancers rehearse Nutcracker, actors perform scenes from The Homecoming, choirs sing carols and musicians play holiday favorites.

This season's Sneak Peek is Saturday, November 20 from 1pm-3pm at the Flint Institute of Music. Enjoy the festive atmosphere while your children explore the musical instrument playground and have their faces painted like the 'Little Mice' from Nutcracker. Munch on free refreshments, register to win door prizes and even take a creative movement class!

No Sneak Peek experience is complete without a family photo taken in the giant Nutcracker rocking chair surrounded by Little Mice and Toy Soldiers. The $5 sitting fee can be applied to the purchase of Nutcracker or Holiday Pops tickets. For more information, check out our events page on Facebook 

I had the opportunity to experience TEDxFlint on Saturday, October 23 at Kettering University and it was inspiring beyond my expectations! TED stands for Technology, Education and Design. Each TED conference is an independently produced, local event designed to inspire people to make changes for the greater good in their community. TEDx gives forward thinking speakers 18 minutes on a stage to present ideas of all kinds. The Flint event was organized by Kevin Simpson who was inspired by a TED event he attended in Dubai, and decided he had to bring the experience to Flint. He feels that this community has to get beyond constant associations with General Motors. To that end, Simpson put together a roster of speakers and performers from all walks of life to share their stories of triumph, as well as failure, and how they learned from these experiences and eventually found their passions. The TedxFlint theme is Focus, Learn, Innovate, Nurture, Transform (FLINT).

I was especially impressed by Jacky and Dora King, founders of Harvesting Earth Educationl Farm in Mt. Morris Township. The Kings teach young people about gardening, self defence and self-sufficiency. Flint native and Michigan State journalism professor Geri Alumit Zeldes is producing a documentary about the Kings hoping  it will help dispel the 'Roger and Me' narrative that has grown up around Flint. The Kings believe that the vacant land springing up in Flint can be seen as a blessing in the form of opportunity to use the land to benefit the community as a whole.

Other inspiring presenters included Flint native and actress Jamie Burton-Oare who feels the nurturing she received growing up in Flint gave her the emotional courage and sustenance to pursue her passions. She is a successful product of the Flint school system and she feels the nurturing she received there gave her the courage to continue pursuing her art.

Flint Mayor Dayne Walling spoke about recycling our city through the use of green technology and looking at our situation from a global perspective.

Kettering Alumna Stephanie Calip Todd decided to leave a lucrative position in London working for a major media conglomerate in order to return to the Flint area and pursue her passion by fulfilling her entrepreneurial spirit by starting a fitness business. She says taking a leap of faith was scary, but well worth the risk.

Harvard Review blogger Peter Bregman pointed out that the only way to succeed in life is to leave our comfort zones, and... "fall face first into what we don't know, taking our hands off our ears when subjects come up that cause 'cringing' emotions, because the cringing feeling never goes away, we just get better at enduring it by listening."

Dr. Steven Livingston shared a slide show of his mission of bringing cell phone technology to isolated communities and the positive changes this has brought.

Artist Daniel Cascardo created a black and white line drawing while telling us about Art, Action, Experience, which teaches kids to express themselves through art in a completely freeing and non-judgemental environment. He invited audience members to fill in the color during our breaks and the result was collaborative awesomeness!

Entertainment was also part of the event. We were blown away by the unbelievebale talent of local percussion ensemble Steelheads. They performed everything from tropical, breezy steel drum music to rocking jazz percussion - they were spectacular! Concilio performed Alt/Rap/Rock that had me tapping my feet. Natasha Thomas Jackson performed her poem about how science has been used as a weapon to keep certain segments of society disenfranchised. And, comedian Stephen James made us laugh and cringe when he said that Flint was really good at creating, and then exporting, brains!

During the break out sessions, I was so heartned to meet so many other people in the Flint comminity who are as passionate as I am about making Flint an artistic hub! A thriving arts community seems like such an important element to any successful community. We have so much talent here, it would be a shame not to share it. If you feel passionate about transforming our city, I urge you to take part in the second annual TEDxFlint on October 22, 2011. Help us use our adversity to tap into our creativity and give birth to new possibilities!

Amy Trottier is the Social Media Coordinator at the Flint institue of Music.

I love Facebook contests. Every time we have a contest engaging our Facebook friends, it adds to our fan-page and allows the FIM to talk to the members of the community we serve, one-on-one and in a relaxed almost 'coffee house' sort of atmosphere. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts have allowed us to find out what our friends and patrons like about our programs, classes, concerts and productions in a way we were never able to before. Social media platforms enable us to have this conversation. In celebration of hitting the 1,500 Facebook friend number, we want to offer our friends old and new a chance to win some prizes and get to know the Flint Institute of Music better.

The Flint Institute of Music is made up of the Flint Symphony Orchestra, Flint School of Performing Arts and Flint Youth Theatre. The 1,500 Facebook Friend Celebration contest will ask three questions about each FIM organization, the answers to all the questions can be found on our web-site www.thefim.org, our Facebook fan-page www.facebook.com/flintinstituteofmusic  and in many of our season brochures, class brochures, pamphlets and literature. Some of the questions will have answers in all or most of our institutional  literature and virtually ALL of the answers can be found somewhere on our web-site. So kids, there will be absolutely no trick questions, this is an open-book test, our favorite kind! So without further ado, here are the questions:

Flint Symphony Orchestra

1. What is the name of the string quartet and storyteller who perform at local schools?

2. What annual event features uplifting music and dance performances, a family dinner, and an  interactive workshop for students featuring the FSO Guest Artist and culminates in a Gala scholarship fundraiser that includes an FSO Classical Concert?

3. How old was Maestro Diemecke when he began playing the violin?

Flint School of Performing Arts

1. This is the number of instruments on which private lessons are available at FSPA.

2. How many dance ensembles are available in the FSPA Dance Division?

3. What professional dance company is featured in Nutcracker?

Flint Youth Theatre

1. What is Shadow Puppet Playtime?

2. What is the theme of the 2010-2011 Signature Series?

3. How many 'Off the Press' staged readings are scheduled for 2010-2011?

Once you have the answers, simply e-mail them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  with the title 'Contest Answers.' All correct answers will be put in a big hat and a name will be drawn (by an impartial FSPA student) from each category. Answers must be e-mailed by Friday, October 24 by midnight. Winners will be announced Wednesday, October 29 on the wall of the FIM Facebook fan-page. Make sure to include your contact  information in your e-mail.

Prizes include: one private music lesson, free Dramatic Breaks tuition, cool t-shirts and a voucher for two tickets to an FSO Classical Concert.

Rules and Regulations: One winner per catagory. You may enter all three catagories. Prizes will be available for pick-up for two weeks after the winners have been announced. Past winners are not eligible for this contest, sorry guys, let somebody else have a chance.

Amy Trottier is the Social Media Coordinator at the Flint Institute of Music

I went to my first back to the Bricks FSO concert last summer and I could not believe how much fun I had! Seriously, I know what you're thinking, "She works for the FIM, of course she is going to say that," but it's the honest truth. I did not know what to expect and I had a hard time visualizing how they could orchestrate an orchestral concert in the middle of South Saginaw Street in downtown Flint, but they did it AND it was simulcast on ABC-12. The featured performers were the Motown group The Contours, featuring Sylvester Potts and they sounded great with the FSO. The crowd was a mix of die-hard Contours fans, FSO lovers and a huge group of pleasantly surprised passers-by who decided to stay for the show once they heard the music.

The vibe downtown was phenomenal. Folks were interacting with each other, clapping, dancing and singing along. I was manning the FIM information booth, which turned into the Contour's photo-op/CD sales table after the concert, so I had a chance to interact with a lot of the audience members. So many people were amazed at the turnout, the quality of the performance and the general feeling of camaraderie that the music seemed to produce. Folks from out of state who had come to show their antique cars commented on what a great place Flint is - nothing like the crime plagued, economically depressed city portrayed in the national media. They seemed taken aback by our city's cultural offerings, great restaurants and pubs along with the warm, friendly people who live here. Many said they would definitely come back this year because their experience had been so positive. The one thing they had in common was a feeling of surprise at Flint's vibrancy. This made me both happy and a little sad. It seems like our city has taken such a beating in the national media for so long, that when people come here and enjoy themselves -  they're pleasantly surprised. Our goal should be to take the 'surprise' element out of the good time, and Back to the Bricks is a perfect showcase for what a proud, fun city Flint is.

I cannot wait for the concert on Friday night, August 12 at 6:30pm with the FSO and Flash Cadillac. Neither can my husband and nine year old daughter! We plan to make the Back to the Bricks FSO concert a family tradition from now on because we had such a blast last year. It's so exhilarating to see so many people enjoying themselves in Flint again. Let's spread the word, invite your friends and family and enjoy what Flint has to offer as we celebrate our city's heritage and Flint's bright future.

Amy Trottier is the social media coordinator for the Flint Institute of Music, you can find her at the Back to the Bricks FSO concert openly tweeting and posting photos on Facebook.

This essay won the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest. It was written by a local eighth grade student and features the Flint Cultural Center as a positive influence in the community because it brings people of different cultures together through performance, music and art.

Some people think that Flint is not a good place to live, and that it is a bad community. Other people view Flint on the brighter side, noticing the great buildings and accomplishments we have made during recent years. I, myself, view Flint on the brighter side. Seeing all the spectacular things Flint has done should make people proud.

Flint is a very diverse city. With many different races, the people of Flint work together in fellowship. From markets and stores downtown, to General Motors, people in Flint work together in unity to make their city productive. A good example of a culturally diverse group in Flint is the FIA (Flint Institute of Art) and the FIM (Flint Institute of Music). The FIA and FIM bring people together of all cultures and races to perform and dance and display all kinds of art and talent for the people of Flint.

Flint is an expanding community. Everyday citizens hear of businesses closing down, but you also hear of businesses opening up. Some new food places that have opened up downtown are Blackstone's, 501 Grill, Soyla's and a new hair salon just opened called Garabela's. The community of Flint has many new businesses, meaning many opportunities to get a job.

To get more involved with Flint, the city should put together more downtown events. Suggestions could be any where from doggie walks and parades in the summer, to candle-walks and ice sculpture contests in the winter. Two activities a season would satisfy the city of Flint, and it will make the people of the community want to get out and become active. People could also put clean-up groups together to clean up the roads of Flint and make Flint a cleaner, healthier place.

The city of Flint has room for improvement, but is also very satisfactory. Some people in Flint are culturally diverse, which allows people who aren't to get to work with them and see their lifestyles. In Flint there are more opportunities for you to succeed, than for you to fail. Flint is a growing community.

Each season, the FIM gets us into the holiday mood with Sneak Peek, a free family event showcasing annual holiday performances. Each November, we decorate the building with life-sized nutcrackers and toy-soldiers, put up a beautiful holiday tree filled with sparkling ornaments and lights and set up the GIANT rocking chair from the Nutcracker. Children attending the event can take home a souvenir photo of themselves sitting in the chair, with the mice and toy-soldiers from the Nutcracker cast alongside.

The preparation for Sneak Peek involves nearly everyone in the organization from maintenance, security and marketing, to instructors, musicians and managers. We bake goodies, set up live feeds for viewing rehearsals and plaster the community with fliers and posters. The choirs, band, dancers and actors rehearse and we fill the place with Poinsettias. Banners are hung on the building with care as the holiday spirit wafts through the air!

We know you enjoy the Sneak Peek, so we thought you might find a photo gallery of the preparation that goers into the event interesting.

Sue Frownfelter has been a professional writer for more than 20 years, and been employed as a reporter, editor and staff writer for various newspapers, magazines and organizations in Michigan. Currently, she works part-time for the largest academic institution in Flint, the fourth largest city in the Great Lakes State. She also served as the press secretary for the Mayor of the City of Flint, and has received top honors as a weekly columnist from the Michigan Press Association. Her work also has received acknowledgments for professional excellence from various organizations. You can follow her blog at http://suefrownfelter.blogspot.com/. She is a current resident of Flint. The Flint Institute of Music invited her to guest blog this week.

What is Right With This Wronged City

Having lived in the Flint area most of my life, I can recall with uncanny clarity conversations with a number of transplants, all who came here due to a job transfer or married someone from this apparently shrinking quasi-metropolis. Each time, I was feeling rather sheepish as they described their circumstances. I nodded reluctantly, ready to begin my apology for their unfortunate circumstances.

Granted, I was young, and had spent a great deal of time humming Tracy Chapman’s song about climbing into “a fast car … We leave tonight or live and die this way.” After all, who would want to stay in Flint?

To my surprise – shock the first couple of times – those transplants weren’t hanging their head. In fact, they looked me square in the eye, smile on their face, and shared utter elation about having moved to a city that the world clearly misunderstood. A former colleague moved from Toronto – Toronto! – and explained that he liked living in Flint so much more than his life in the cultural, entertainment and financial capital of Canada. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. What he and another transplanted co-worker shared with me on separate occasions is their dismay of the negativity associated with the fourth largest city in Michigan.

In both cases, and all the other similar transplant conversations I have had since, the Cultural Center tops the list of what is right with this wronged city. From the landscaped pristine presence to the truly vast residential offerings of the Sloan Museum, Buick Gallery & Research Center, Longway Planetarium, The Whiting, Flint Youth Theatre, Flint Institute of Arts and Flint Institute of Music. What’s not to like, the happily transplanted ask?

It’s in those conversations that my mind wanders back to Flint’s reality – a long line of celebrities who have graced the stage at Whiting, from Joan Rivers to Capt. Stubing (sidenote: The Captain - Gavin MacLeod – gave me his pin from the Great Wall of China! I had admired it on his hat, he took it off and gave it to me! Ya can’t get that in Toronto!!) The beloved field trips to Sloan and the Planetarium, my own children performing ballet and on instruments on the stages of the FIM. The lines aren’t New York City long nor is the instruction inferior to the Famed School of the Performing Arts.

It’s all right here.

It reminds me of the old television episodes of Mork calling Orson (Come in Orson…). A seemingly normal creature – ok, somewhat normal! – lands on earth and begins walking among the humans, learning their ways, studying their habits. The creature interacts with all sorts of characters – be it grumpy old men, a hip old lady or a young woman wishing for something more for her life. The expectation is that Mork will discover that earth is an inferior world to neighboring Orc. His reports to his boss, however, describe just the opposite. Mork, in fact, likes earth more than he likes his own home planet – and he doesn’t want to leave – much to the chagrin of Mindy who really would like nothing more – at least until Mork lands on the scene.

Daryl Hannah once said, “It's not necessary to go far and wide. I mean, you can really find exciting and inspiring things within your hometown.” And while it seems strange we would take to heart something from someone who once played a mermaid, sometimes the Good Lord uses what He’s got in his medicine bag to heal blind eyes to the truth.

Thank God for the mermaids, the aliens, and in my case, the transplants who just may have been sent here to slap the blinders from our eyes and teach us something about ourselves!

- Sue Frownfelter

One of our Board Members brought this into a meeting a couple weeks ago.  We all thought it eloquently spoke of the importance of music and arts.  Read below and sound off what you think.

A Contemplation on Music

Welcome address to parents of the incoming freshman class at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory.

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One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician.

I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prisoncamp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture; why would anyone bother with music? And yet, from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art. It wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art.

Why?

Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001, I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment," as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass-time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece, Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings - people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding, cry a couple of moments after the music starts.

Why?

The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you, if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from hi buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle.

How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationship between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: "If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2:00 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8:00 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft."

"You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well."

"Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."