Steve Reuter

08/13/2026

"The other day, after I finished mowing, I took a moment to appreciate having the lawn tended. It's a little thing, but I'm learning that joy often comes in slivers, and they often lie in wait for us to open ourselves to them. Which means, if we're not attentive, we miss most of the joy available to us.

As I tried to be mindful of this particular sliver of joy, I began to reflect on how the space acts as a canvas, arena, and time capsule for my family. We make memories that, years later, we can almost re-live if we squint hard enough. Keeping it maintained means more memories, more joy, more satisfaction.

But I also get incredibly aggravated by it."

Read more on my Substack!

https://stevereuter.substack.com/p/lawns-party-guests-and-learning-to?r=4das1w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

07/08/2026

“So many of us are stuck with fuses when what we really need is a circuit breaker. A blown fuse looks like success. It did its job by it keeping us from something worse. So, we conclude our emotions are working correctly, and in a narrow sense they are. But if a fever-pitch outburst is the only time our awareness snaps into focus, we’ve missed nearly the entire point of the emotion. The message was available the whole time, in shifts far too subtle for a fuse to catch. We just weren’t wired to receive it until it became a crisis.”

A leader I was working with recently waved a hand and said, “Sorry, I just blew a fuse back there.” She meant a moment earlier that week when something small had tipped her over and she’d snapped at someone she didn’t mean to snap at.

06/14/2026

“When a political leader describes opponents as enemies, as vermin, as traitors, as something less than fully people, the leader is not merely venting or persuading. The leader is setting a temperature. And the people who take their cues from that leader calibrate to it, usually without noticing they are doing it. The words travel down. They teach. They establish what a person is now permitted to feel about a neighbor whose yard sign offended them.”

I’m thankful to be able to share my op-ed from today’s The Minnesota Star Tribune paper.

"The precondition for violence is conceptual before it’s ever physical. A person has to first be moved, in someone’s mind, out of the category of the fully human. Only then does harming them become thinkable," Steve Reuter writes.

06/12/2026

Violence almost never starts with violence.

By the time someone acts, the real work is already done; and it happened in language.
Before a person can harm another, the other one has to be moved, quietly, out of the category of the fully human.
A person becomes a type.
A type becomes a thing.
And a thing is something you're allowed to do anything to.

It rarely arrives as a shout. It comes quietly:"those people," "there's something wrong with them."
Each phrase doing the same patient work.
The words we use about the people we oppose are never just words.

06/08/2026

Today marks the beginning of What We Can Do Weeks 2026, and we are just six days from the anniversary of our tragic loss of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman.

This time of year will carry echoes of that day, and of all that followed through 2025. May we never lose sight of one another, and may we fight fiercely for one another’s humanity, rather than against it.

Melissa Hortman and Lisa Demuth modeled the kind of deliberate investment in their relationship that is too often missing in political life.

04/02/2026

“It’s a shared hope for all of us that, at one point or another, we can change the minds and actions of another person. No matter how many times we hear it, or how it’s said, we continue to hold onto this fleeting dream that, if we could say just the right thing in just the right way, then they’ll get it – they’ll have the epiphany I know they need to have, and life will finally get better. But time after time, we are left disappointed and discouraged at the lack of realization by the other person. And after enough time, our hope that they’ll change shifts toward contempt that they didn’t.”

In a recent workshop on conflict, I had someone ask me, “I get the whole ‘take the high road’ thing, but what’s the point if they don’t meet us there?

03/27/2026

If you need to coach someone, set boundaries, or just tell someone “no,” remember the restaurant analogy!

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

03/27/2026

“The problem isn’t that we simplify. We have to simplify. The problem is that we don’t realize we’re simplifying and therefore don’t subject that simplification to proper scrutiny.
We mistake our quick assessment for a complete one, treat our assumptions as facts, and act on them with the confidence of someone who has done thorough due diligence. In reality, we’ve done nothing of the sort.”

Did you know that your senses can take in up to one billion bits of data every second, but that you can only consciously process around ten?