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.
Today I’m breaking my arbitrary rule for photos. Normally, no living human faces are allowed to be shown, but today I’m letting myself do it differently. The event organized on Friday, July 25th (in which some of you readers were participating) justifies the exception to the rule.
Here featured is a gathering of those still present at the very end of the event, at which point we were led by two young people in their early 20s speaking out loving affirmations “I am enough, I am loved… we are enough, we are loved…” and we repeated after them.
The event was called “Rooted in Imagination,” and the fundraiser part of it is still open, if you’d like to read the description. The other part of it was bringing people together in a spirit of authenticity and connection, to celebrate with our presence what it can feel like to be in a room of diverse people and know that the strangers around us are kinder than we fear, more interesting than we yet know, curious just like us. Bringing everyone together felt to me like a dream come true.
Something to Consider
Organizing takes work. Organizing takes time. Organizing takes energy. It’s not something most people think about, when they come to a gathering or an event, as a participant. They really only think about it if something goes wrong. If everything goes well, and the participants have organized stuff themselves in the past, then they might be extra grateful for the thoughtful way something was put together.
The same is true of organizing spaces — cleaning up or decorating intentionally. The work put in (once the organizing is finished) is usually taken for granted a little bit. We accept things the way that they are. The organizing work is mostly invisible, and yet ever so helpful.
There is an organizing work that often goes neglected in this day and age. The highways and internet gateways and AI-generated smartphone-enabled app-ways that we can go down so fast at the click or the push of a button, of an accelerator… all of it has sped up our neural pathways. But the zooming about has us neglecting the work of organizing our thoughts and emotions. Organizing our thoughts and emotions could help us feel more calm, more understanding, more safe. But it takes time to do this type of work.
As with all organizing work, if we help one another, the work becomes easier. Are there people in your life helping you organize?
Something to Read
Change for the Better (The New Fatherhood)
Every so often I share something I have written and published elsewhere. This is one of those days. The essay “Change for the Better” was published in the aptly named newsletter focused on envisioning new ways for us to show up as fathers in community with others who want to do the same. Author of The New Fatherhood, Kevin Maguire is coming out with a book next year, and his commitment to the work of parenting better has been an inspiration to me for many years. I am here figuring it out with you all, how can we change for the better?
My essay’s argument in brief, drawn from deeply-felt life experience: We might want to be “better parents” than our parents were for us — and we might even say that out loud to friends — but to actually change for the better, we need good intentions, committed practice, accountability to change our relationship with our own parents and deep attentiveness to the confronting feedback our children share with us. Then, practice and practice again :)
Something to Listen to
“Everything Goes With Blue” by Rihanna (Smurfs movie soundtrack)
This summer I saw the Smurfs movie in theatres with my mom and my kids, and it was a… a funny experience. The storyline’s a bit cheesy, and it feels like the Trolls trilogy inspiring the Smurfs (who themselves inspired the creation of Trolls) in a kind of pop culture recycling machine. But I liked the fact that Paris, Belgium, Germany are all featured as set-props, and the mash-up of Rihanna as actor and songwriter with a comicbook brand that was invented in the late 1950s… it merits a smirk. 😏
The thing is, there was a simplicity to the story and the message that might make us roll our eyes, and yet also shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed. Without spoiling the narrative for my readers, because it’s something you can predict will happen from the first few minutes, the main character No-Name eventually realizes that his clutzy kindness holds within it a kind of magic, and that’s his purpose. To bring something new, something magical, that isn’t something easy to promote as a kind of Self-Branding, but which is essential if we’re going to save our communities… it’s Kindness.
Yeah, that’s all it is. Kindness :)
(Everything goes with blue)
Something to Practice
Even when we’re feeling uncool, feeling blue, feeling like a no-name, unsure of what to do, we can be… KIND :)
It’s true. Kindness is retro, like a vintage wine. It’s goes well with everything.
Let’s vote KINDNESS 2028,
JPC 😎