What Happens When You Stop Looking for the Lesson?
By: Gayathri Shukla, originally published on LinkedIn on Sep 30, 2026.
A year ago, I went to a park in Calgary and tried to do something that, for me, was surprisingly difficult.
I had been taking an Indigenous Science course for my PhD studies at University of Calgarywith Dr. Kori Czuy. Every class was held in circle, with no notetaking allowed, and many classes taking place on the land itself versus on campus.
The biggest ask?
To simply be present.
Our midterm assignment was also to go to the land, pay attention, and share back in circle what we learned.
My mind resisted almost constantly.
What exactly am I supposed to be listening to? What is the outcome? How is this productive?
After almost two decades as an engineer, I had been trained to structure complexity, solve problems and move toward an outcome. Even learning, to me, meant gathering information and doing something with it.
I remember that moment in the park vividly. Trying to get myself simply to pay attention but feeling I was somehow doing it wrong…that is, until I finally realized I needed to stop looking for the lesson, and start listening.
One of our readings was Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Land as Pedagogy. I had initially understood that as learning on the land. What I began to understand was much deeper: land is not merely the setting for knowledge. Paying attention to what is moving, changing, growing and disappearing – and recognizing ourselves within those relationships rather than outside them – is part of the pedagogy.
Then Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass pushed me further toward reciprocity: not simply What can I learn? but What does relationship ask of me in return?
Later that semester, Dr. Czuy generously invited our class to a sweat with Elder Hal Eagletail of TsuuT’ina Nation. It was my first sweat ever, and I am so grateful for the gifts they shared with us that day – which I now understand don’t need to be explained here into a tidy takeaway.
Now, a year later, I notice this in my facilitation work at Campfire Kinship.
I leave more silence, even when I can feel the urge – mine or the room’s – to fill it. I remind myself someone’s story is not just a lived experience but a living experience – it does not need to be immediately translated into a lesson, framework or action item.
And today, on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, that leaves me thinking about the relationship between listening and action.
We are asked to listen to Survivors and Indigenous communities. To learn the history. To understand what residential schools attempted to sever – relationships to family, language, culture, community and land.
But listening cannot become another performance.
Can we listen long enough to be changed? And then act like we heard?
And more importantly: the action does not always need an audience.
Reconciliation is not measured by what we post today. Sometimes the more meaningful evidence is what happens tomorrow – in the decisions we make, whose voices we make room for, how we relate to the land, and what we are willing to change when nobody is watching.
What I am still learning – after that moment in the park and later as I shared at my midterm – is that, perhaps my role as a facilitator is not to keep doing more, but to create space for the unexpected to emerge.
Who is someone whose teaching has stayed with you? And what is one lesson you are still learning how to live?