Grace

Grace.

I read Sarah Brokaw’s book Forty-tude: 40 Life Lessons for the Modern Woman as I entered my forties and unknowingly prepared to shoulder the personal fallout of what would be a decade-plus aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Brokaw wrote about the personal transformation that comes with the forties and her finding that the most common characteristics of women who successfully navigated the decade were confidence, grace, and a positive outlook. I knew I had not yet achieved confidence. I looked up the meaning of grace: a disposition to kindness and compassion. It sounded like such a “soft” skill back then. I pushed it aside.

In the decade-plus that followed, I learned resilience and grace in what were often not graceful or nimble steps filled with daily, at times hourly, affirmations: Life is good. I am lucky to be alive. The 2008 financial crash had been preceded by the 2001 9/11 attacks, followed by the 2016 presidential elections, the January 2020 attack on the White House, the COVID pandemic that halted the world, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the ensuing protests against the atrocities on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As a nation, we were offered only the briefest of reprieves before we did a deep dive back into great political uncertainty in the United States and around the world.

After the 2024 presidential elections, nerves are frayed. Yet, we all have choices about how we will personally navigate this world and the people closest to us. Who will we be in relationship to ourselves and others? I continue to choose - curiosity with the desire to understand myself and others with an inherent kindness, forgiving if only to let go for myself to move forward in this world with grace- and the nimbleness and fortitude (meaning courage in pain or adversity) to do the work that needs to be done.

I hope you will join me.