Hey there!
Here's my latest contribution to Gracing Change, a curated collection of ideas and resources to help you become more comfortable with navigating change. And this month, love is in the air 💛......
My extended family currently includes a handful of pre-school age kids and right now the talk all seems to be about buckets. And not just the sandpit variety. Nope, dinnertime discussions are all about our invisible buckets, and the words and deeds we can use to help make sure that other people get these buckets full.Lucky for me I'm back in Australia right now, with my bucket being filled with that special kind of love that being back home with family and friends always brings. But all this talk about buckets has got me thinking about love, and the role it plays in our work of shaping change.As you can read about in my own exploration of love from private life to a public good in my recent blog, I think it's time for a new love story. But don't just take my word for it! In this edition of Gracing Change, I'm excited to share links to a number of interesting people, all of whom are inviting us to rethink our ideas of love.
PHILOSOPHY
A Fresh Perspective
When it comes to reexamining our views on love no-one does a better job, in my opinion, than Swiss-born British author and philosopher Alain de Botton. Whether you read his essay “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” (one of the most-read articles in The New York Times of recent year), get lost in his most recent novel "The Course of Love", or listen to this wonderful interview with Krista Tippet from On Being, de Botton is certain to get you thinking out of the box.
For me, he was the first person to challenge our strange ideas of singlehood, as well as offer up the reflection that for some people, relationships are not necessarily the place where they encounter their best selves in ways that certainly got me thinking about the limitations of my own love stories.
SCIENCE
Platonic Friendships -- The Key to Happiness?
What’s the single best action a person can take now to live a longer life? How do you take the edge off of depression? What can single people do to flourish, and married people do to revitalize their marriage? As Dr. Marisa G. Franco explores in her new book, Platonic, the answer to all of these questions is good friendship. Through Platonic, Franco uses scientific research to demonstrate how platonic relationships are perhaps the most vital factor in shaping our identity and achieving genuine happiness and fulfillment, then offers data-driven strategies for improving the quantity and quality of connections.WELL BEING
Tilting the World Towards Love and Connection
Even before Franco's research on platonic friendships Dr. Vivek Murthy, current U.S. Surgeon General, had sounded the alarm on what he calls "an epidemic of loneliness -- as harmful to health as smoking, and far more common." His book Together is an exploration of the connection between physical health, public policy and human connection.He discusses the ideas behind his book in this wonderful interview in 2020 with Brené Brown. In a more recent interview, he also explores the concept of love as a public good and the agency to be healers that is available to us all.
So here it is, from my heart to yours 💜. If you haven't yet done so today, tell someone you love them. A brave new love story awaits us all, and I look forward to writing it with you.
I hope that this episode of Gracing Change has given you something on which to pause, question, learn and/or reflect. If it has, let me know. You can reach me via email, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
With love.
Corrina
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