eightstrong community — I shared in the last post that I was trying something new, and you are along on the trust walk with me as I walk this path of entrepreneurship and community-building in the midst of raising a family, writing, tending to my marriage and my friendships and other family, being outside in my garden or on a walk or run, and all that jumble we call living.
Today, I’d like to introduce Just Visiting, an audio project grounded in the idea of a “visit,” which for me growing up was sitting down to tea with my grandmother or mother, intended to be time to catch up and be with each other.
Just visiting is sitting across the table from someone to catch up and to be with, and in the back and forth, in visiting, you harvest deeper learnings about yourself through connecting with others. It’s the me too and I’ve been here and how exciting and tell me more. It’s that feeling of energy and light you feel after. It’s what you give back in simply sharing that light with others in the course of your day. And it’s in returning, for another visit, next time.
Transcript
Just visiting with eightstrong.
Just visiting is an idea inspired by myself going to visit my grandmother when I was a student, a law student at Michigan, and she lived up the road in Chelsea and I would go visit some Sunday afternoons when I needed a break from studying or just wanted to catch up. And I’d visit her in her little apartment. She would always pull out something from the freezer, a snickerdoodle cookie, some veggie beef soup which I would still eat despite the fact that I was a vegetarian since college, because who can resist grandma’s veggie beef stew? And we’d sit down and she’d asked me how I was doing, and I’d share with her what was going on in law school or my life, or what my partner was up to, how my friends were, what I was liking about school, and what was really hard. And she’d share what was going on in her community, this place that had become her home after moving from Traverse City, where she lived for so long. And in that give and take, we would settle in with each other. And really, it was about catching up. But more broadly, it was just about sitting with and spending time with my grandmother. Sitting with someone who knew me so well and who I was learning and re-learning as we grew into adults and into our older age. And so Just Visiting is intended to be just that, sitting down with a friend with your grandmother, with your parent for a cup of coffee and catching up. And from those catching up, harvesting deeper learnings for yourself about where you are, how you are doing in this day, what your hopes and dreams are, where you’d like to pivot. Where you might want to make a change or what’s going really well for you. It’s a way of practicing gratitude. It’s a way of identifying areas for growth or for change. It’s a way of sitting with and being with in our community, which is really a bigger way of saying with our neighbors, with our family, with our friends, with our colleagues, with people at church, with moms, at the pick-up line. With whoever we choose to fold into our lives. And perhaps don’t choose, but they choose us. And so I hope from Just Visiting you feel that sense of what it is to sit across from the table from someone and share where you are and you feel from Just Visiting someone sitting with you too.
Thanks for listening with eightstrong. Keep on being courageous and creative in the leadership of your life.