Don't Send Us Back to the Stone

Reflections on leadership, war, and the courage to remain human.

A few weeks ago, during one of our group conversations with Simone Lovati and Serina, Simone shared a song by U2 titled The Tears of Things. At the time, I didn’t listen to it immediately.

Only this morning did I finally press play and I’m glad I did.

The first thing I felt was not inspiration, but heaviness.

The lyrics felt uncomfortably close to the world we are living in today—a world filled with grief we did not choose. Conflicts we did not start. Losses that belong to people we will never meet, yet somehow feel present in our own lives. War, displacement, fear, anger, ideology, power. All of it moving faster than our ability to fully feel it.

The song revives an ancient idea from Virgil: lacrimae rerum—the tears of things. It suggests that sorrow does not live only inside individuals. It lives inside the world itself. Inside history. Inside systems. Inside decisions. And, inevitably, inside leadership.

As I listened, I couldn’t stop thinking about the images coming from the Middle East. Cities reduced to rubble. Families erased in moments. Children growing up learning the sound of drones before the sound of laughter. Human lives becoming numbers, headlines, or “collateral,” depending on who is speaking.

And I wondered quietly, uncomfortably—how easily suffering becomes distant when it is not ours.

There is something in the song about stone that stayed with me. Stone as emotional numbness. Stone as certainty without compassion. Stone as strength that has forgotten how to feel.

Photo by Jianxiang Wu on Unsplash

I thought about leadership. About how often we are trained to harden ourselves. To endure. To perform. To carry weight without breaking. To move forward even when our inner world is asking us to pause.

We call leaders “corporate athletes,” and the metaphor is accurate. Like athletes, we operate under sustained pressure. But unlike athletes, we are rarely taught how to recover emotionally. There is no space for grief, confusion, or moral fatigue. There is only the next target. The next decision. The next crisis.

Slowly, almost without noticing, endurance replaces empathy. Discipline replaces listening. And strength begins to resemble stone.

When the song pleads, “Don’t send us back to stone,” I don’t hear art. I hear fear. Fear of what happens when leaders stop feeling—because when leaders stop feeling, systems follow.

I see it when decisions are made without human context. When efficiency becomes more important than dignity. When suffering is explained away by strategy, geopolitics, or economic necessity. When the cost paid by people is invisible to those in power.

At first, it looks like control. Later, it reveals itself as distance.

And distance, I’ve learned, is where humanity quietly disappears.

This reflection became even more personal when I thought about kindness—not as softness, but as courage.

Kindness is often misunderstood in leadership. It is seen as weakness, as indecision, as emotional indulgence. But in reality, kindness is one of the most demanding forms of leadership. It requires presence. It requires listening. It requires the strength to hold discomfort without escaping into authority.

Kindness does not mean pleasing everyone. It does not mean avoiding hard decisions. Some of the hardest moments in my leadership journey, letting people go, giving painful feedback, drawing firm boundaries, looked harsh from the outside. Yet with time, I’ve learned that some of those moments carried growth, clarity, and even gratitude.

Sometimes people only wake up when life becomes uncomfortable.

Kindness is not about making everyone happy. It is about acting with humanity, responsibility, and honesty—even when it hurts.

One line from the song stays with me: “There is no us if there is no them.”

I think about that often. About how easily leaders talk about “we” while forgetting “them.” The exhausted. The frightened. The invisible. The ones who pay the price of decisions they never made.

When I look at my own life, I know how untrue the idea of “self-made” really is. I am here because of people, my family, my team, my colleagues, those who carry parts of the load with me. Leadership may look individual, but it is deeply collective. There is no “us” without “them.”

Recently, this understanding became very real to me through a simple conversation. I interviewed a young woman with quiet strength and discipline. When I asked how she saw herself, she said she is ambitious person but not only for her own success. She wanted to contribute to her family and to the people around her. She spoke about caring for her body and her mind because she had lost a family member to cancer. That loss reshaped her understanding of ambition, discipline, and purpose.

Listening to her, I felt something soften inside me.

It reminded me that ambition does not have to be destructive. That power does not have to dehumanize. That strength can be guided by care. That even in a world torn apart by war and suffering, human values still exist quietly, stubbornly, in everyday choices.

The song does not give answers. It gives responsibility.

It asks me, again and again: will I become stone, or will I remain human? Will I chase performance, or will I build endurance? Will I stand above suffering, or will I refuse to add to it?

In a world full of tears from war, from loss, from fear, leadership is not about standing taller than others. It is about staying human when everything around us rewards hardness.

Kindness is not the opposite of performance. It is what allows performance to last.

And perhaps the most important choice I can make, both as someone who leads a team and as a human being, is this: to allow myself to feel the tears of the world and still choose dignity, compassion, and responsibility in the way I lead.

This reflection is written from a personal perspective, inspired by music, and lived leadership experience.

Reference:

• U2 (2026). The Tears of Things. From the EP Days of Ash. Island Records.

  There’s no start to this story

And I can see no end

To young men hearing voices

Whisper in the wind

I woke up made of marble

A shepherd boy in shock

Michelangelo

release me

From a single block

I’m David the giant killer

With heart-shaped eyes

I was naked as a soldier

Far from my mother’s cries and

The tears of things

The tears of things

Rising like a flood

The tears of things

The tears of things

I’d cry them if I could

Was it you, Lord, I was listening to?

You didn’t say much

You said “Let my fingers form you,

Be fashioned by my touch,

Be open to be broken

As every heart that sings,

No voice and drum can overcome

A symphony of strings”

You said “You’d make of me an instrument

For melody and word”

I wonder as things fall asunder

Was it really you I heard or

The tears of things?

The tears of things

Songs made out of rain

The tears of things

The tears of things

Here we go again

Mussolini came to see me

A shadow by his side

Church bells ring, a vanishing

Then the vanishing denied

Six million voices silenced in just four years

The silent song of Christendom

So loud everybody hears

Before the roar, before the blast

The stench and shame

There’s a howling, wailing sound

That screams your name

I’m David not Goliath, I was born in Bethlehem

And there is no us if there is no them

My eyes were burned from all I learned

There were things I can’t unsee

In this your holy war

There’s nothing holy here for me just

The tears of things

The tears of things

Rising like a flood

The tears of things

The tears of things

I’d cry them if I could

If you put a man into a cage and rattle it enough

A man becomes the kind of rage that cannot be locked up

No, it cannot be locked up

No, it cannot be locked up

Dear God you made us so you wouldn’t be alone

Every heart is exiled until a heart gets home

Don’t send us back to stone

Don’t send us back to stone

I was made for worship before I spoke I sang

Songs of grief, of disbelief

How a woman can love a man

The naked song, the sacred song

That every soldier fears

‘Cause when people go around talking to God

It always ends in tears

Yeah, the tears of things

The tears of things

Let the desert be unfrozen

The tears of things

The river sings

Who would choose to be chosen?

River, sea and mountain

Desert, dust and snow

Everybody is my people

Let my people go