This holiday season, we are bidding farewell to 2020 and welcoming 2021 with a series we are calling “The Conversation,” a collection of brief, but meaningful, insights and reflections, curated and shared by members of the Domain7 team. Centring on themes that help us reflect on a tumultuous year and move forward into the future, we are exploring change, resilience, community, transformation, and grounded hope. Today’s host is Jeremy Penner, Senior Growth Strategist at Domain7. Just a note that we are, like many of you, working largely from home, and that these recordings may have a homemade flavour. We hope you enjoy joining us in our work and neighbourhood environments for a little audio visit. Here’s Jeremy.
Jeremy Penner:
Hello and happy holidays. The other week, my colleague Sheila, shared a blog post with our team focused on tuning in and turning in. It provided an invitation for us to tune into our emotions with compassion and curiosity, taking space and time to acknowledge and understand our emotions during this time, rather than reacting and pulling away without thinking. The invitation then moves to turning in toward these emotions, exploring and taking care of our needs in the moment. It gives us choice.
COVID continues. We hoped in March that we wouldn’t be here. That said, we knew it was possible that it may continue into the fall. We were holding out hope that we would be through this by now. We’re not. This has been a tough year for all of us.
The piece I wanted to share with you today is from Elizabeth Edwards. She experienced some incredibly hard challenges in her life, but still chose to face them with optimism. She says, “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”
I chose this particular piece because a lot of us are feeling stuck these days. We feel like choice has been taken away. We can’t visit people we want to, we feel restricted and trapped. We’re caught in a new reality that none of us chose. Elizabeth Edwards would eventually lose her battle with cancer. And the day before she passed, she shared these words:
“The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that, and yes, there are certainly times where we aren’t able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It’s called being human. But I have found that the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious.”
Jeremy Penner
2020 has been a hard year for us all. Each of us has experienced our own unique mix of challenges. There have been days where we’ve been drained, unsure how we’re going to make it. We don’t know what’s next, but we can tune in to what we feel and how we’re responding. We can turn inward to decide how we want to act, how we want to move forward, and how we want to show up. We don’t need to be perfect. It’s okay for it to be challenging.
My hope for you in this season and every day moving forward, is that you live with hope in whatever you’re facing. I have a series of questions I’ll leave for you to consider. In whatever today brings, how can I bring hope to myself and those around me? What steps can I take to make an impact on this small part of the world that I exist in? Who around me needs to feel noticed? Who around me needs to feel valued? Who around me needs to feel appreciated, and how can I, in some way, reach out and help them? I’m Jeremy Penner with Domain7, thanks for listening.
Veronica:
Jeremy read a quote by Elizabeth Edwards in a 2009 interview with NPR. We encourage you to check out her book Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities, published in 2009 by Crown Publishing. “The Conversation” is a special edition of Domain7’s podcast, “Change is in the Making.” Our audio producer is Kurt Wilkinson, and our designer is Ryan Martinez. Music provided by James Boraas,. Leadership and editorial support provided by Sarah Butterworth, Kevan Gilbert, and myself, Veronica Collins. Please tune in each weekday for the first half of December to hear more from our team on moving from 2020, into 2021 with hope and purpose. Or visit us at domain7.com for more ideas, resources, and podcasts. Happy holidays.
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