The last few times I have done a Come Look at Art with Me, a member of my family has come. And each time, it has been someone I had rarely, if ever, looked at art with before. I love that. Something I created to look at art with other people has also given me a new way to share something I care deeply about with people I already love.

On a recent morning, before getting ready to leave for the Boston experience, I was asking myself why I am doing this. It is so easy to get caught up in numbers. How many people liked something? How many said yes? How many showed up? Even when the response is extraordinary, numbers tell us one thing. They don’t necessarily tell us what an experience means to us.

Looking at art with other people has always been one of my favorite things to do. When I ran museums, and before that when I worked as a curator, there were designated times when I would do exactly that. Now, these experiences keep me out looking. I get to talk with people I know and have never looked at art with before, and with people I have never met. It keeps me on my feet. I learn things I didn’t already know. I see things I might not have seen on my own.

In Boston, we looked together at Hank Willis Thomas’s The Embrace, the enormous bronze memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King based on an image of the couple embracing. There are no faces. Thomas gives us the gesture instead, and the space within it allows other people to enter. I love that an artwork about an embrace requires us to move around and through it, changing what we see depending on where we stand.

Doing something because we want to, because it gives us joy and keeps us curious, is already valuable. Sharing it with other people expands the experience in ways we cannot anticipate. Sometimes the person standing beside us is someone we love and have known forever, and we still get to see something together for the first time.

What do you love doing simply because doing it is already enough?