I spent this weekend at a rambling, comfy house in the country with three of my oldest friends and their families. It was grounding and soul-filling and totally chaotic. There was pickleball! There was wrestling! There was a puppy!

In many ways the four of us are about as similar as four distinct persons can be: we’re white cis-het women in our early forties, graduates of a Christian liberal arts college. Though we fall in different places on various spectrums (liberal to conservative, economically upper- to middle-class, introverted to extraverted), the real distance between us on those spectrums is…pretty small. But even among us, there are dozens of questions about how best to live this Table life.

Three of us teach English as a Second Language in some capacity—to children, to adults, professionally, as volunteers. One of us is a foster parent to asylum-seeking kids and teenagers who’ve just crossed the southern border. One is a grant writer for a nonprofit org serving survivors of sex trafficking. One of us is up to her eyeballs in needy young children and their constant needy needs. On the news-intake spectrum, one of us skews toward “can’t, shan’t, nope”; another has a morning practice of NYT + WSJ + local paper, with periodic perusal of Fox News headlines to keep tabs on what her parents are imbibing. (Yes, she's rad.) We’re libertarian and moderate and lefty and wanted-to-be-moderate-but-now-I-guess-I’m-a-Democrat??? We serve in our church’s leadership teams and reparations groups. We have various amounts of money to spare after feeding and clothing the people in our houses; we have various priorities for that money, though all of us prioritize sending some of it out the door. We live in cities and suburbs. Our parents’ health varies somewhat, and we’re not sure what that’ll mean in the next few years. None of us have big, fancy lives, but the four of us together have a lot going on: a lot of resources, a lot of decisions to make, a lot of obligations, a lot of heartache and a lot of joy. Abundance and overwhelm and overwhelming abundance.

Even among the small audience for this site, our questions about how to live well are all over the place. What are the most effective ways to advocate for justice? How can we balance caring for the kids and adults who live in our homes with those who don’t? Volunteering vs paid work? Local vs global? Personal vs policy? How much do we need to know about the news, about politics? Is it selfish to pause our volunteer work for a bit, to decline to re-up as ESL teachers or foster parents? How can we best allocate money? How are we supposed to call our representatives, if we don’t know what we’re asking for? Can we call them at midnight and leave a message, once everyone in our house is finally asleep, goddammit? (The answer to this, per one of you, is yes. Dedication!) How to balance social justice work with mental health? Where’s the hope?

But this weekend reminded me that it’s not up to us, individually, to answer all of these questions. That’s what the group is for, what the Table is for. The truisms are true: Life is long. Each of its seasons makes different requests of us. Our bandwidth waxes and wanes. We can be both fiercely committed to justice and gentle with ourselves and each other. What matters most is not our ability to speak knowledgeably about any given hot-button issue, but what we do with our time, money and energy regularly—daily, weekly, monthly—over the long haul.

For a person who so desperately wants the world to get healthier, and who feels an agitated and outsized sense of responsibility to make (make!) that happen, this weekend was a deep breath and a warm reminder: none of us is in the struggle alone. We’re together, carrying different amounts of weight at different times, helping each other shoulder it, sometimes urging each other forward and sometimes encouraging each other to rest awhile. At the beginning of another academic year, it was exactly the reminder I needed.