The End of the Year Often Calls for Lists
Lists of “The Best of”, things we’ve accomplished over the year, aspirations for the one that’s coming, etc.   We’ve been thinking more about listing people–people who have moved us, people who inspired us, people that we lost, and really anyone that impacted us, good or bad.

Our friend Lizzy celebrated her 56th birthday this October by getting pinned for three hours under an ATV 4 wheeler on a desolate plateau, lungs punctured, back broken, and preparing to die.

Did You Forget?
For those of you who know Rebecca, you know she and identical twin sister Jenny bicker all of the time.   After one of many heated arguments with Jenny, Rebecca called her husband KC in tears.  Initially he comforted her but then, when she launched into righteous indignation at her sister’s outrageous behavior, he said “Did you forget…?  Did you forget that you are dying?”

Watercolors in Afghanistan
Carolyn, a US Air Force National Guard reserve who was twice deployed to Afghanistan, shared with us one of her go-to ways of coping with being in a war zone. Each Sunday, she would go out onto the base with her watercolor set to capture any flowers she could find. Whenever she was painting, people would approach her wanting to admire her sketches.

Myers Briggs Feelers/Positive or Negative Feelings?
Gioia and Rebecca are both Feelers on the Myers Briggs Personality Type. In fact, Gioia and Rebecca have the exact same profile—Extrovert/Intuitive/Feeler/Perceiver (ENFP).  However, where they differ is that Gioia is prone to positive emotions (joy, connection, contentment, energy) and Rebecca negative ones (anxiety, guilt, anger).

I Can’t Be Non-Judgmental!
Jane, one of Rebecca’s clients, was in tears the other day because she has been trying to practice mindfulness but, as she put it, “it’s impossible for me to be non-judgmental and accepting when I’m trying to meditate.  I can’t seem to stop my mind from second guessing whether I’m doing it right, and I get distracted by all of the things that are bothering me.”

Early Morning Contemplations
Rebecca and her husband, KC, live out West in Arizona but they work on East Coast time.  Each morning they get up at the crack of dawn and start the day with a warm cuppa to watch the sun rise (Rebecca with a fresh decaf green tea with honey and KC with a mean quad espresso with three tea spoons of sugar).

Interviewing Eric Murangwa, Survivor of the Genocide in Rwanda
As part of work that Rebecca is doing with the World Bank Group on stress management, burnout prevention, and resilience, Rebecca had the honor of interviewing her friend and colleague Eric Murangwa, MBE, a Tutsi Rwandan who survived the genocide that devastated his people and his country in 1994.

If you do nothing else for your wellbeing today, do the “three good things” exercise:  Write down three things that have gone well in your day, big or small.

Why?  Because it makes you happier.  Even if you write just one thing that you feel good about, it helps overcome the negativity bias which, as we have explored many times in our newsletters, makes us focus on negative over positive information in our environment.

During a family zoom call (a ritual many of you may be familiar with), Rebecca’s little sister Julia and her best-friend Katy voiced that even though there seemed to be “a light at the end of the tunnel” with COVID, there is a still a sense of disorientation as we slowly emerge from the last year and try to reckon with the changes we have undergone as a result of the pandemic. 

“People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.” 

It’s February. That means Black History month. It means the month of love. It’s the month which marked a year since the world began fighting the pandemic. It’s the month in which those of us in the US are just beginning to recover from a bloody and contentious transition of Presidential power.

Rather than trying to neatly summarize this difficult year which has challenged our humanity in so ways or trying to deliver witty lessons that should be extracted from that hardship, we have chosen to end the year with a bittersweet story about a dog named Valkis, his owners Kyle, Carolyn, and George, and a neighborhood collaboration to reunite them.