Some said 2022 was “the year we lost it”—Will Smith slapping Chris Rock being one piece of evidence, albeit a frivolous example, illustrating that we are “living in a rage-filled emotional dystopia.” There is more substantive research supporting that “the world is suffering” in unprecedented ways. And there are far more poignant examples that 2022 has exacted a lot from us.

The war in Ukraine and droughts across Eastern Africa were a persistent backdrop throughout 2022. Cries of “women, life, freedom” in Iran, floods in Pakistan, storms in Puerto Rico, and shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, or Brooklyn added to the year’s weight. And while many “people have stopped worrying about COVID-19” and “there is light at the end of that tunnel,” 2023 marks the start of our third year of living with a pandemic that “isn’t done with us yet.” Experts warn that “the tunnel is still dark, with many obstacles that could trip us up if we don’t take care.”

Added to these were the slow, but increasingly protuberant, ballooning of rising political polarization, growing economic inequalities, and any number of other distressing realities on the global front. And perhaps most importantly, entangled in all of this were each of our personal journeys in 2022.

Ideally, there were triumphs, discoveries, new directions, and great joys. I, and I hope all of us, had moments to rejoice, laugh, and celebrate. Even amidst all that has been going on in the world, I hope that you can look back on 2022 with some (or even great) satisfaction about goals accomplished, battles won, and milestones reached in all parts of your life. My family, friends, and colleagues and I shared stories of both achievement and challenge related to health, relationships, finances, and more, but the most frequent topic seemed to be around issues of work.

In 2022, quiet quitting emerged as a sequel to the Great Resignation. Studies point to toxic work environments as the lead cause for this shakeup in professional lives, but equally important, “nearly ⅔ of US-based employees” pointed to thinking about “their purpose in life.” For some, this happened early in the pandemic, long before we got to 2022, and for others this past year was the year to rediscover, reestablish, or find anew one’s purpose in life.

And this brings me to the main point of what I have found myself reflecting on as we begin 2023–the sound of the genuine.

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What seems like eons ago now, a small group of us faculty, staff and administrators were engaged in the work of how to attain more equitable outcomes for students at our university. Our discussions eventually (reluctantly) prompted me to share with these colleagues a message I delivered to incoming Morehouse students and their families years prior (during the 2014 New Student Orientation)–“I love you brothas.”

For most of 2022, I think I replayed in my head one of my colleagues’ responses to hearing that address: “Where is that Kai?”

She, and others, reminded me of how much I had quieted myself, how much I missed connecting my role as a college leader to a much larger sense of purpose, and how much was lost in that disconnect, both for me and for those around me.

Having started a brand new role, in an entirely different environment, in September 2022, I have had the blessed good fortune of being reminded of what connected me to my work in academia. Recently, I shared with my new colleagues a version of a kind of ethos from my friend and former colleague, David Wall Rice, shared in the context of working together at Morehouse:

We do this work because we think differently,

fundamentally differently,

about Black boys and Black men—

their potential, their strengths, and the possibilities.

Our approach is to help our young men hear

the sound of the genuine

not to see them as deficient or broken in need of being fixed,

but to see all of our students as

full of potential and gifts and genius,

waiting to be discovered, engaged and amplified.

The spirit of this message has, I’d like to think, always been with me, but these words are a powerfully explicit manifestation of that spirit. (As an aside, one of the best work gifts I have ever received was these words back this past December as an engraved plaque.)

Someone asked me “what is ‘the sound of the genuine’ mentioned in this quote?”

It is a reference to a 1980 Spelman College baccalaureate speech made by Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman–scholar, dean, mystic, a man who conversed with and incorporated the ideas of Gandhi, and a mentor to many, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The original can be found many places, but I offer up an edited (and condensed) version that marries Thurman’s words to what I would want to say to you (and to myself) as we open up 2023. (This is really half of his message; I will look to share the second half later.)

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Sound of the Genuine (adapted from the original by Howard Thurman)

There is in every person, in you, something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. Nobody like you has ever been born. And no one like you will ever be born again. You are the only one. And if you miss the sound of the genuine in you, you will be unfilled all of your life.

Do you remember in the book, Jesus and his disciples were going through the woods and there appeared in the turn of the roads, a man who was possessed of devils, or so they thought. In the full moon, as the great tidal waves of energy swept through his body, he became as ten men. They chained him to a rock. And when a spasm of energy rocked his body, he would punch the chains and scream like an animal in pain.

Jesus asked him one question. “Who are you? What's your name?”

And for a moment, his crazed mind righted itself and he said, “That's it. I don't know. There are legions of me, and they riot in my mind. If I only knew, then I would be whole.”

So the burden of what I have to say to you is this:

What is your name?

Who are you?

And can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?

There are so many noises going on inside of you; so many echoes of all sorts; so much internal rumbling and traffic, confusions and disorders that our environment creates, that I wonder if you can get still enough, quiet and still enough to hear coming up from your unique and essential idiom, the sound of the genuine in you. I don't really care. This is your assignment.

Whatever you may think about the story of your journey, it is in fact a very simple, practical thing—and please don't be bored of my repeating this over and over—but you are the only you that has ever lived. Your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences. And if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will, all of your life, spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

So I come back to this: There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. And sometimes, there is so much traffic going on in your mind, so many different kinds of signals, so many minute fast impulses floating through your body, some that go back generations before you were even a thought in the mind of creation. And you are buffeted by these. And yet, in the midst of all of this, you have got to answer:

What is your name?

Who are you?

And how does the sound of the genuine come through to you?

When I was a student at Rochester, New York, late one night, I was coming down Main Street at about 12:30. The streetcars stopped running. There was no traffic. And I thought I heard water flowing under Main Street.

So the next day, I asked one of my friends who lived in Rochester, is there some water or a river, canal, something on the Main Street? He said, “oh yes, a part of the Erie Canal goes along Main Street. But during the day, there is so much traffic, so many streetcars and automobiles, you can't hear it.

But when the noise dies. Then it comes flooding up from under Main Street. The sound of the Erie Canal.”

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don't be deceived, and thrown off by all the noises—all these things that don't allow you to hear the sound of the genuine in you—don’t let them keep you from your dreams, your ambitions.

The sound of the genuine is running through you. It is the only true guide that you will ever have. And if you don't have that, you don't have a thing.

You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideas that are part of this generation are. But beware–until you know the sound of the genuine, you don't have the foggiest notion who you are, where you're going, or what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself. Cultivate whatever that is, and the rest will take care of itself.

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And so ultimately, with all that is going on in the world and all that we are sure to be bombarded with over the course of 2023, my greatest hope for each and every one of us is that we find or continue to hear the sound of the genuine. As Sheryl Lee Ralph said “and don’t you ever, ever give up on you.”

Happy New Year.