There is a small piece of Ireland in the middle of Manhattan. Not something designed to look Irish. A piece of Ireland itself.
The Irish Hunger Memorial in Lower Manhattan contains an authentic famine-era cottage from County Mayo, dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic, then rebuilt in New York. The landscape uses Irish soil and vegetation, with stones representing all thirty-two counties of Ireland. From its raised position, you can look out towards Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
I discovered it this week whilst watching a television report about New York. As the reporter walked through this small piece of Ireland, she began talking about the Claddagh ring. Then she said something that stopped me.
Following the attacks of September 11, around two hundred Claddagh rings were recovered from Ground Zero.
Some details deserve to be held with respect rather than turned too quickly into a lesson. This was one of them. It did, however, make me want to understand more about the ring and the meaning people had carried with them.
I had seen Claddagh rings throughout my life. I knew the design well: two hands holding a heart, topped by a crown. I had never really stopped to understand what those three symbols meant.
The hands represent friendship.
The heart represents love.
The crown represents loyalty.
Three simple symbols. Three extraordinary commitments.
Perhaps part of their power is that these meanings have been carried through generations. Claddagh rings have been given as tokens of love and friendship, carried across oceans and passed from one generation to another. Different hands wear them, different lives unfold around them, yet the symbols remain.
There is something beautiful about that.
We inherit more than objects from the generations before us. We inherit stories. Values. Phrases. Ways of seeing the world. Small pieces of wisdom repeated so often that we sometimes forget where they began.
Some we carry forward exactly as they were given to us. Some we come to understand only much later. Some we have a responsibility to examine, reshape and then pass forward differently.
I have never owned a Claddagh ring. Now I think I will invest in one. Invest is the word I mean.
Not simply in a piece of jewellery, but in myself. In the person I am today, the person I am becoming, and in a promise to stay loyal to both. Of the three words carried by the Claddagh, loyalty speaks loudest to me.
I have always been fiercely loyal to the people I love. To me, loyalty means being there when I am needed, often before I am asked. It means noticing what someone might need and stepping forward. It means being impeccable with my word. It means defending someone just as strongly when they are absent as I would if they were standing beside me.
For much of my life, though, someone was missing from that definition.
Me.
It is remarkably easy to keep our promises to everyone except ourselves. We say we will exercise tomorrow, until something more urgent appears. We will get enough sleep once this busy period ends. We will make time for ourselves once everyone else has what they need.
There is nearly always a good reason. Work needs us. Someone we care about needs help. Something needs fixing. A deadline moves. An unexpected problem appears.
Our own commitments get pushed to tomorrow because, somehow, the promises we make to ourselves become the easiest to renegotiate.
I know this pattern well.
I could be completely dependable for somebody else while quietly abandoning a commitment I had made to myself. The gym could wait. Sleep could wait. My own needs could wait. Eventually, they could not.
I have learned that constantly sacrificing ourselves in service of everything and everyone else does not increase our capacity to contribute. Eventually, it wears that capacity down.
If I want to show up in this life with energy, passion and generosity, I have a responsibility to protect the things that make that possible.
Sleep matters.
Hydration matters.
Movement matters.
Exercise matters.
Boundaries matter.
Time to think, recover and simply be matters. These things are not indulgences competing with a life of contribution.
They are what make a life of contribution sustainable.
When I invest in my health and vitality, I am investing in my capacity to be there for the people I love. I think more clearly. I give more freely. I bring greater energy. I have more patience. I am more present.
Looking after ourselves does not diminish what we can give to others.
It expands what we have to give.
Perhaps that too is loyalty. Loyalty has another side that has taken me longer to understand. Being loyal does not always mean staying.
An idea has travelled through generations in my family: we become like the people we spend our time with, so choose wisely.
I don't know where that wisdom began. Perhaps that is the point. It has simply been handed down from one generation to the next until it reached me. The older I become, the more I understand it.
Loyalty should never ask us to abandon our values, shrink ourselves or stay somewhere simply because we have always been there.
Sometimes loyalty to ourselves, our values, our purpose and the person we are becoming asks us to leave.
A relationship.
A job that no longer reflects who we are becoming.
An area or country that once felt like home but no longer does.
An environment.
A habit.
An expectation someone else has placed on us.
Perhaps even a version of ourselves that once served us well but no longer does.
A routine.
Leaving is not always betrayal.
Sometimes it is alignment.
I believe we are either growing or diminishing. I choose to grow.
Not because life should become an endless chase for some more impressive version of ourselves. Quite the opposite. I choose growth because this is the life I have been given. One extraordinary, precious life.
I want the health and vitality to live it fully. The courage to use it well. The capacity to contribute greatly. I want the people I love to know, without question, that when it mattered, I was there.
Perhaps that is why a centuries old ring suddenly means something different to me. The heart reminds me to love deeply. The hands remind me that none of us travels through life alone. The crown reminds me to stay loyal: to the people I love, to my values, to my purpose and to the promises I make to myself.
So I think I will invest in that ring. Not simply to wear it. To remind me.To invest in the person I am today and the person I am still becoming. Perhaps, one day, it will pass into another pair of hands.
I like that thought.
That something I chose as a promise to myself might eventually carry a story I cannot yet know. That another person might wear it for their own reasons, in their own life, long after mine has moved on.
Maybe that is part of what we are doing here anyway. Receiving what was handed to us. Learning from it. Living it in our own way. If we are fortunate, leaving something worthwhile for the hands that come next. Loyalty, I am learning, was never meant to run in one direction.
It was always meant to come home.
Perhaps that is the promise I want this particular ring to carry.
Being loyal to yourself is what makes contributing greatly possible.
Wear the promise if it helps. Live it so that, one day, it is worth passing on.
Is there a promise to yourself you have been quietly renegotiating?
Which of the three symbols speaks to you most: the hands, the heart or the crown?
Nova x
