CONTENT In Joy
The Forum Featuring Rick Thurmond A Year of 5-Question Interviews An End of Year Reflection: The End of Us Year-End Giving A Word |
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December is a month dedicated to joy—a tiny word that packs a good punch. Holiday cards invite it. Ads tease it. Choirs exalt it. Kids on Christmas morning embody it. We seek to experience it and to give it. Immense pleasure and happiness are the order of the season.
While joy is widespread during December, it seems to dwindle in January, once the festivities end and school and work resume. But what if joyfulness were a year-round pursuit for us all? How can the holiday season’s emphasis on joy carry into and throughout the new year?
A blueprint for more joyful living exists in our holiday traditions and mindset. Consider the following ideas for the new year. Practice gratitude, which can serve to spark joy. Make time to connect with the people, places, and things that delight you. Give gifts. Bestow compliments. Breathe in nature’s beauty each season and bring a bit of that beauty indoors to stir your senses.
Let’s enter 2023 with an intention to discover more joy. Peace may be elusive and sorrows inevitable, but joy can be ours to manifest and share. |
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“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy."
― RUMI
Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, and Islamic scholar
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You're invited to take your shot! |
Please join us for the January 31, 2023 gathering of The Forum featuring Rick Thurmond. Rick is Chief Marketing Officer of Charlotte Center City Partners and former publisher and editor of Charlotte magazine. For over 25 years, he has helped shape the narrative of Charlotte, build a vibrant city, and lead teams of creative professionals. In this forum, we will explore how "story and collaboration" is key to achieving any vision and to personal and community flourishing. We'll learn how narrative is at the heart of leadership, how to draw the best ideas from people around you, and taking your shot. Our setting will be Community Matters Cafe. |
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Save the date!
March 31st - April 5th, 2023 |
A Year of 5-Question Interviews |
BY VALAIDA FULLWOOD Revisit Valaida’s 2022 interviews with movers, shakers and gamechangers, sharing their stories, their hopes, their challenges, their motivations, and their joys. |
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An End of Year Reflection: The End of Us |
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We come to the end of the year and the beginning of a new one and a ‘Year in Review’ is a common appetizer: looking back at highlights with self-congratulatory delight and looking forward with promotional excitement. See what we did. See what we’re about to do. Good for us. Good for you. In the business we’re in, dependent on the kindness of strangers, we invite you in, we experience moments together to shift minds and behaviors and conditions for lives that are enriched, better and more. This end-of-year business and beginning of the new year is a reset. We gather ourselves, grateful, amazed, hopeful, a bit worn, rallying for what events will bring.
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These are early and late remarks. We are in an early and late stage. What I mean is that everything is early in the scheme of things. There are millions of years ahead of us. Objectively the planet will exist beyond our existence. This organization I lead, the one whose newsletter you are reading, is early in its existence. We got out of the gate. We bring people together. We have plans. What else is there to do but to mix and mingle and create? But it’s also rather late. The Anthropocene. Humans really are doing a number on Nature. We could be here. We might not be here.
I have this view that love is a shield. I was raised by parents who loved me. They did their best. Most parents do. We bounced around as a family. Good times. Bad times. You know we had our share. But everything I experienced was a gift. The dinners. The scraped knees. The made-at-home costumes. A remark about finding the light within.
I read an article in The Atlantic today entitled “The People Cheering for Humanity’s End.” Adam Kirsch wrote it. He’s a poet, professionally. The article talks about the prospect of the actual extinction of Homo sapiens. Us. Human beings. Eight billion +. That the end of us is imminent, or that the idea of it is spreading on the fringes of the intellectual world, and we should welcome it. There are people revolting against humanity. Kirsch reports that “the turn against human primacy is being driven by two ways of thinking that appear to be opposites.” The first set of advocates for the end of us are environmental anti-humanists who see our self-destruction as inevitable. Humans are destroying the planet and we have crossed the point of no-return. If Nature is to survive, people need to go away. The extinction of humans is the last chance for clean air and water and any biodiversity.
The second set of advocates revolting against humanity, or at least humanity as we know it, are transhumanists: people who “believe that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations such as mortality and confinement to a physical body.” Transhumanists seek to live long enough to live forever: stronger, faster, smarter, or better still, living as disembodied data flows endowing the cosmos. What these two ways of thinking have in common – environmental anti-humanism and transhumanism – is a desire for a post-human world.
The article knocked me back. Here I am, a humanist, an advocate of the humanities, of those disciplines that explore our history, dreams, wonders, and imperfections, a celebrant of humans as creators of meaning, and it just may be that all that activity, all that stirring of the pot, is simply, as Kirsch notes, “metaphysical egoism that leads us to overwhelm and destroy the planet.” Is our quest for human flourishing leading to our demise? Is our quest to become more of who we are destroying us?
Well that certainly gives us something to talk about. Maybe we shouldn’t be The Charlotte Center for the Humanities and Civic Imagination at all. Maybe our very mission of helping people and communities flourish is a road to ruin. All great truths are paradoxical. Or maybe our only path to survival is to do what we are doing, humbly: exploring what role love plays, how we talk to the animals, how we live together, the nexus between science and religion. Maybe our only choice is finding the light within.
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ABOUT THE CHARLOTTE CENTER |
Our mission is to help people and communities flourish. We accomplish our mission by bringing people together to explore community issues through the lens of the humanities and civic imagination. We seek to deepen human connection so we might live our best lives. The more we know about ourselves and each other, the wiser we are in what we do. JOIN THE MOVEMENT
If you've been to our events, if you believe in civil discourse, in the power of ideas, in learning and conversing freely, in ideals of inclusion, creativity, and connection, in bringing the world to Charlotte and Charlotte to the world as the Forum and out Charlotte Ideas Festival gain momentum, then please consider supporting us. | |
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gratitude to our sponsors |
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Thank you to all of our generous donors and sponsors that make our work possible. |
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| | I have drunken deep of joy,
and I will taste no other wine tonight. |
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY English poet |
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Our Contact Information
The Charlotte Center for the Humanities, Inc.
620 N. Alexander Street,
Charlotte, NC 28202
704-807-3674
TheCharlotteCenter.org
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| The Charlotte Center is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization.
Word to the Wise is compiled and edited monthly by Valaida Fullwood Design by Goldenrod Design Co. |
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