I always anticipate, with excitement, the fall season, because it feels like a chance for a fresh start–far more in my opinion than the New Year. And I like nothing better than spending hours on Labor Day weekend, staring out at what is hopefully a beautiful view, and pondering what changes I want to make to improve and inspire my work and life. I love making lists. And this is when I reexamine and reevaluate long-term goals and write them down. I also like to dive into a couple of inspiring reads.
But this year feels different. There has been a lot of negativity and divisiveness in our world of late. At the same time, there has been an energy that has been created by community–whether it’s the Women’s March or the response by fellow Americans to Hurricane Harvey victims, that is encouraging. So I am trying to make new long-term goals that have a larger impact than just in my life. And I am thinking about how to grow my TFI community of strong women to encourage larger conversations. One book I am going to read is Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I was reminded of from last week’s New York Times T Magazine. It is not at all a self-help, goal-oriented book, but a look at history and how hope creates positive actions, even though the path is often unpredictable and unknown until it takes shape. Sometimes in thinking expansively, you find granules of truth you can apply to your life. The other book I want to read, that Shirin Von Wulffen mentioned in her interview, is Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. It is a sort of self-help book about living in the present. And it seems the antithesis of making long-term goals, but an important practice that many people I know try to follow.
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