Happy 2020, friends! I hope that your new year is off to a wonderful beginning. If, though, like me, you’re already feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything only ten days into the new year, I invite you to use this season of new beginnings and new approaches to try a maybe new-for-you approach: cut yourself some slack. Not a natural slack-cutter? Yeah, me neither. As I type this, I’m feeling all the guilt: guilt for not finishing all the work I had scheduled for this week; guilt for this post being late due to aforementioned work; guilt for not helping my husband get my three kids to sleep, due to this post needing to get sent in ASAP. Etc. Etc.
I recently read Kate Northrup’s Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms. (Although the title specifies mothers, the book is suited for anyone in a caregiving role, and I think that’s pretty much everyone.) Anyway, the premise seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? How can we do less right now? Besides what’s going on in our personal lives, our country’s politics are in disarray; bigotry and hate crimes continue to occur daily; and the world is literally on fire. Where do we even begin, let alone stop?
While I’m not in complete agreement with every point in Northrup’s book, she does make a number of good ones, and one of them is that we simply cannot do (and hold) everything alone. We are a species built for community, despite the fact that many aspects of our modern lives leave us in isolation.
Here’s where I bring it back to UUCA. (You were wondering, weren’t you?) We begin with each other. With our community. When things are scary or overwhelming or just too darn much despite outward appearances maybe looking like you’ve got it all together (*raises hand sheepishly), we can always begin at UUCA. Our community uplifts (and challenges) its members. Our community has created social justice action plans. Our community offers hope. And the more we engage with that community, the more supported we can feel.
This new year, I invite you to engage in some new-to-you ways. Perhaps join the Peach March and Rally on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, offer to lead a Wednesday Thing activity, or maybe sign up for a covenant group. Or, even simpler but perhaps more profound, make a point to connect with people you don’t know well at church coffee hour. Ask how they are and really listen. You can change the world more than you’ll ever know by these tiny seeds of kindness.
And yeah, we’ll make mistakes and missteps. We might occasionally miss deadlines (sorry, Tish!) and leave our spouses to do bedtime solo (sorry, Josh!) But if we put ourselves out there, the connections we make can relieve so much of the fretting, self-guilt-tripping, and despairing. And that can open up more time for the actual doing of the important work we all have before us.
Nora Carpenter, Board of Trustees