The Distance Between Comfortable and True
You don't need the right words. You need someone willing to walk alongside you into unfamiliar territory.
Sofreh is a translation project. And I get it.
nasim Alikhani isn’t explaining Iran to New Yorkers. She’s letting them taste it. Negotiate it. Argue with it a little.
She doesn’t paper over the unfamiliar. She leans into it. Her staff is trained to walk guests toward new flavors — toward the fenugreek rice, toward the bread — rather than retreating to what’s safe and recognizable.
The result isn’t confusion. It’s connection.
I think about this every time I sit with a family navigating end-of-life for the first time.
Because death is unfamiliar territory for most of us. We don’t have a language for it. We don’t know the customs. We’ve never been here before, and nobody handed us a map.
And the instinct — entirely human, entirely understandable — is to retreat to what’s safe. To not say the hard thing. To change the subject. To wait until we’re more ready, more certain, more something.
But here’s what I’ve watched, sitting with families across years of this work:
The conversations that feel most impossible before they happen are almost always the ones people are most grateful for afterward. Amen.
Not because they were easy. Because they were real.
I love that Nasim trains her staff to be guides, not gatekeepers. To walk with people toward the unfamiliar with warmth, patience, and genuine conviction that something good is waiting on the other side of the discomfort.
How do you think that feels?
It’s exactly what end-of-life planning asks of us.
Not to have all the answers. Not to know the right words. Just to be willing to cross the distance between what’s comfortable and what’s true — one conversation at a time.
This is the invitation I extend in every session of the Legacy Leaders Guide.
Come into unfamiliar territory. Let someone walk alongside you.
Discover that the conversation you’ve been avoiding is actually the one your people most need you to have.
The next cohort is forming. Small group. When you’re ready.
The fenugreek rice is worth it. I promise.
— Patricia
Next: Maya Angelou reminds us, ‘People forget what you said. They remember how they felt.’ What Nasim Alikhani’s mother taught her about hospitality — and what it means for the people you’ll one day leave behind.