The Bridge #110
in which we prepare for a new year, slowly by slowly
Hello
& Welcome ! The Bridge is a newsletter connecting the professional and the personal creatively across cultures and a diversity of topics, until we are not only full of ideas but also ready to take action. Thanks for joining in the conversation.
This year we fight.
Many times when we say we will fight, it (maybe without our realizing) is in service of the already-powerful. We might fight to win an argument or to put people in their place, but it turns out we’re flexing when we could have been listening to a new point of view.
This year we fight for the not-yet-powerful-enough. We fight for a rebalancing. We fight for more voices to be heard, each in their turn.
And sometimes the voices not-yet-powerful-enough, not-often-enough-listened-to, are the voices of our childhood selves, inside each of us, that we might attend to more closely, that we might honor with greater care.
To cultivate hope, it sometimes takes a intentional courage to go deeper and explore what might be unfamiliar in order to discover something better than anything we have ever yet had words for.
We will…
Take Time to Consider
What makes life more meaningful? Coming to clarity (from time to time) on our values, checking in with ourselves at a deep enough level we realize what we really care about and connect that to our daily habits, for me it makes life more meaningful.
We could easily fall into living a life that we did not choose. If it happens to be that the life we did not choose is one that suits our personality and circumstance, if we are really happy with it, then that’s worth celebrating.
Myself, I grew up uncomfortable with the circumstances (the culture, customs etc) I was born into. Studying history, other cultures, traveling — I don’t know if I was neuroatypical to begin with or if life experiences re-wired my brain (chicken or the egg) —, but I do know that I have always felt more at ease in multicultural contexts. These were contexts I needed to seek out. I needed to make new friends, discover new environments, figure out what was temporarily uncomfortable and ultimately for my good vs what was painfully uncomfortable and only temporarily to be endured.
I now know with clarity what it feels like for me to “have arrived” and to be living a life that brings me the right amount of security. & for many years I was muddling through, before getting “here” — a place that is not a place, not a geographic location, but the feeling of HOME.
Personally as the year continues I’ll be checking in on this regularly, as I continue to advance, experiment, meet new people, try new configurations, learn new things, I’ll be asking myself: Do I feel at home in my relationships? Do I have enough to feel secure? & every time I hear the answer is "YES” — then I will celebrate!
Whether it’s what we choose or what we stumble into, let’s celebrate meaningful moments in life, right? Let’s celebrate more often.
Find Time to Listen
“C’est que du bonheur” by Stromae
Parenting matters.
You know if you’ve been reading me for a while that I care deeply for my two daughters. & figuring out what it means to relate to my parents in adulthood, figuring out what it was like for my parents growing up with their parents, it’s all fascinating to me. I have come to believe in the parenting clichés (“it goes so fast!” / “they’re such a gift”) and I have absolutely wanted also to scream from the balcony (from time to time) “THIS IS so DIFFICULT!”
Parenting is amazing, and also so challenging. I think to be “good at it” we need to acknowledge both sides.
Stromae (a globally-recognized French-language singer-songwriter/rapper/producer/fashion designer) grew up in Brussels with a Tutsi (Rwandan) father and a Flemish (Belgian) mother. He’s sung about his childhood before, and now he’s a father. This song though “C’est que du bonheur” (It’s pure happiness) is not about him, so much as a way for him to give voice to the parents of young children, telling their children (when they get older) what it’s like to have children. An incredibly joyful experience, and also “such a joy" 😂 with the vomit, pipi, caca, and all of the rest:
Oh, how beautiful it is to be a parent /
You will see, it’s pure happiness /
You will see, it’s such a joy /
There’re smells and diapers, /
Vomit, poop and all the rest /
You will see, it’s pure happiness /
First, you idealize me /
Then, you despise me /
Ok, Okay, you’ll freak out a bit /
Then, you’ll pack your bags and… /
Get out of here! Get out! /
Invest Time Reading
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
Each month I co-host a dinner club in Paris for multicultural professionals with creative or entrepreneurial interests (called The Embassy). I might have mentioned it before.
During a recent dinner conversation, I was talking about the experience of becoming fluent in French and having now this other identity, one that feels almost unbridgeably separate from whom I am as an English-speaker. One of the other dinner participants then suggested this book by Jhumpa Lahiri, and I felt the need to read it right away as a way to make sense of what I’m going through.
It’s the first time I have read a book in which someone describes so precisely this experience of becoming fluent in another language and figuring out (in writing) why we have this compulsion to immerse ourselves so deeply in the language that we didn’t learn at birth. The author Jhumpa Lahiri herself was born in America and her parents taught her Bengali at home in her first few years. Then she learned English at school and became so fluent in English she won a Pulitzer Prize for her first-ever-published book (a collection of short stories about people straddling two or more cultural worlds and trying to make sense of that.) In middle age, she fell in love with Italian and moved to Rome with her husband and children in order to immerse herself fully in the new language. She even published stories and this book in Italian!
In Other Words is an incredible testament to the hard work it takes to surrender mastery of a language and world (English in her case), and willfully attempt (imperfectly) to not only get a point across one time but to keep going long enough to find eloquent articulations in this other language (Italian), to describe the process, to write and write and write and write, and be constantly corrected and still to persist. The book is a treasure.
Win Back Time When We Practice
What are the things that you care about so dearly that you’re willing to fight for them — with tenacity and tight hugs?
Can you find coziness amidst a discomfort that stretches you,
profound security in a curiosity that continues to explore?
Preparing
for a new year,
slowly by slowly
😊 JPC