Wintering
Helping Friendly Newsletter, 12.17.21
GM! ☕️
Here are this week’s 5 things to consider:
Programming note: This newsletter and I will be taking a winter break. Today will be my last email of the year. Happy holidays, and thank you for reading! I’ll see you in your inbox on January 7, 2022.
1. Wintering
We don’t merely survive winter. We flourish because of it. This idea is the throughline of Katherine May’s Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. The book explores the dark, the cold, and the natural rhythms of regeneration. It’s a wonderful companion for the season.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
—Katherine May
2. Feedback isn’t enough
New Year’s resolution for managers: shift from critic to ally in 2022.
3. Neurodiversity
VIP (very important perspectives): how to be a good friend to an Autistic person and neurodivergent people make great leaders.
4. The Giving Tree
The Giving Tree, the classic children’s book by Shel Silverstein, echoes lessons that many faiths teach us. I’m revisiting it this holiday season.
5. Jazz hands
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at that end, and the thing was to get to that thing at that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
Thank you for reading
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Treasure chest
I bet you find a gem ➔ Doris Derby’s searing, intimate photos of the Civil Rights movement | how complex systems fail1 | birds aren’t real | other people don’t think you’re a mess2 | the most brilliant bookshops in the world | how to spend 432,870 minutes on spotify | curious coincidences on NYC sidewalks3 | 2021’s best book covers | we have turned the year | I’ll be OOO for 2 weeks, so…👇🏼
Kidding! 😉 You’re awesome, exactly as you are. Happy holidays, and I’ll see you again soon.
Jenny
Via Charlie Warzel.
Via Daniel Pink.
Via Rob Walker.