PEBBLE
I will never apologize for embracing joy and beauty — even when the world is falling apart — because joy and beauty are my fuel for activism.
~Karen Walrond, shared by Roz in California
BOULDER
We are meant to live in joy.
This does not mean that life will be easy or painless.
It means that we can turn our faces to the wind and
accept that this is the storm that we must pass through.
~Desmond Tutu, shared by Michele in Washington, DC
PONDER
We’re inching toward the end of year holidays, a period that for most of us creates a combination of joyful merriment and stressful wonkiness. The bad news first: the holidays are unlikely to be “perfect.” The illusions we conjure up about the perfect holiday season are based on a combination of nostalgia-dripped memories, sky high expectations, and a deep yearning for a festive and fun-filled end of the year. Most of us have some combination of these, and they are to some extent inevitable. They’re also a recipe for disappointment and disillusionment.
The good news is that the holidays don’t need to be perfect in order to be enjoyable. It helps if we can remember to recognize the rose-colored distortions of the good old days, downshift expectations to a more realistic level, and remember that just like every other month of the year, December will likely include a combo pack of good days and sad days, weird days and hard days.
If you’d like a little help embracing joy in the coming weeks, you are invited to hang out with the members of our Team Ripples Patreon Community for an informal Zoom chat. We’ll unpack a few tips and tricks we usually review this time of year to help make the hectic holiday season a little less stressful and a little more merry. This is a low-key and informal thing, and I promise you’ll end up a little more relaxed AND a little more invigorated, too. Are you in?
There is no cost to join us for this; you’ll just need to register to get the Zoom link, so choose which session works better for your schedule:
Sun, Dec 8, 2024, 3pm Eastern (2c, 1m, 12p)
Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 3pm Eastern (2c, 1m, 12p)
Whether you can join us for the zoom or not, I’ll keep sending out these weekly splashes every Monday to help us all embrace the joy and handle the yuck.
