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.
How was your summer?
Myself, I spent 5 weeks in the USA with my daughters, doing a little bit of work at first supporting my coaching clients and organizing a networking / fundraising event that took place on Friday, July 25th (more on that soon). Then going full-on vacation mode when my partner arrived in NYC, and we roadtripped a little and spent lots of quality time with friends and family. It was nourishing and connective! All about enjoyment and presence.
Also, I’m now “rebooting” my France-based operating system, figuring out what to integrate and what to let go, settling back into our home, re-learning how best to keep a healthy life rhythm… even as I grow.
Something to Consider
When we first got back to France, we struggled as a family to reset our sleep patterns. Said another way, we struggled with jet lag.
But it wasn’t just about sleep, because we also struggled (each in different ways) with remembering our routines, stabilizing our emotions, prioritizing or figuring out what was most important. Like, my 4 year old was missing her grandma particularly when it was “time for bed.” We struggled to figure out if we should stay up with her later because she “wasn’t tired” or insist she get back into the routine of bedtime at 8:30pm. Which debate itself triggered memories of past parental conflicts when our kids were infants-becoming-toddlers learning how to sleep, and their sleep-deprived parents struggled to communicate in a healthy way as partners. (Anybody out there able to relate to this?)
Then, our 12 year old felt like we were giving her younger sister too much attention, so she had her own little existential crisis, a bid for attention if you ask me, and I found us talking about how I wished we were still on vacation too, but things shift and it’s OK. — That’s why I love my coaching practice.
Because supporting others through times of transition to re-find their balance is a way I remind myself over and over that EVERY transition moment has this bittersweet-ness. We grieve what we cannot keep, and we are excited by what we stand to gain.
We experience the bitterness of what’s no longer working. (No longer in an American timezone, that’s the facts.) AND at the same time, we experience the sweetness of finding back a better flow. In my case, rediscovering how much I need the American can-do spirit and readiness to try new things mixed equally with the French-style commitments to restful vacation and long-term friendships. A creative balance. It’s stabilizing for me to remember that bittersweet-ness is always going to be there, whenever we face a transition. It’s how life works :)
Something to Read
how to slow down time (the neuroscience of time perception) by Yana Yuhai
To me this is a well-organized and clearly-explained essay on time that weaves in the perspective of neuroscience and recognizes how much it’s about how we perceive life that helps determine the relation between time and our experience.
In brief, we can slow down time, if we choose carefully what we pay attention to. If we introduce healthy amounts of novelty or look for exceptions to patterns, we will pay closer attention to what is around us. We’ll then have more memories and markers of time, time becomes more dense, and we experience time more slowly.
We can also accelerate our experience of time if we prioritize for predictability.
What feels more appealing to you? Faster? Slower?
Something to Listen to
A central lyric to this song is the line “Ako ang bakunawa,” which if you googletranslate means “I am the one who knows” in Tagalog (Filipino). But I learned of the artist and her song via NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. The band won a competition (that involved 7,500 submissions) - and I’m grateful to know of this multicultural wonder. Ako ang bakunawa is a reference to folkfore, in fact, meaning:
“I am the moon-eating dragon.” Which is how they refer to the experience of a lunar eclipse.
With these translations side-by-side we hear the power and the force. Ruby Ibarra, immigrant living in the US, knows her strength. She sings with a multigenerational band backing her up. She demands attention for she knows herself (and her peoples, her communities, her cultures, her stories).
Can I break this cycle I was taught as truth /
Rewrite my story, unlearn my youth /
Thought I was these things that I know I’m not /
So I prayed to moons, but the prey was caught /
I learned their language to arm my words /
Protect my story so I said it first /
If I don’t know me, what is my past /
If I don’t know me, what is my path /
Something to Practice
Can we pay attention to LIFE a little closer, slow down time, explore more the bittersweet-ness?
Can we notice what is changing and figure out together how best to live in this moment? How to balance the old and the new, the many human cultures that live inside us and around us?
Maybe we need to gather around a little poetry…
Write your truth,
JPC 😎