The Real Work

by Annalisa Holcombe, Founder & Principal Consultant at Connection Collaborative

The world feels heavy right now. War. Famine. Displacement. Rising authoritarianism. The economy feels precarious. Political discourse feels poisoned. It can be hard to look at the headlines — and even harder to know what to do with all that sorrow and fear.

And yet, spring keeps showing up. The trees keep blooming. People still fall in love. Babies are born. And daughters graduate from law school.

This past month, I watched my daughter, Bree, walk across the stage at Lincoln Center—already hired by Bronx Defenders, already honored for her public interest work, already winning cases as a student. And all I could think was: this is the real work.

Not just the courtroom work Bree will now do, but the witnessing, the presence, the becoming. The full, overwhelming joy of watching someone you love rise into the fullness of who they are.

When Bree first told me she wanted to go to law school, she did it almost cautiously—maybe because I had stepped away from the practice myself. But she’s not following in my footsteps. She’s blazing her own path, and doing it with more clarity and courage than I ever had.

There is no career accolade, no keynote, no raise, no big win that compares to the joy of seeing someone you raised step into their calling. That is legacy. That is meaning.

And still, I find myself struggling to hold it all. The weight of the world against the light of that moment. The grief and the grace. The brokenness and the blooming. We don’t get to choose either/or. We live in the and.

Grief and celebration.
Fear and awe.

So I’m holding both, and I’m inviting you to hold both, too. Because that, more than anything else, might be the real work.