Over the past couple of weeks I’ve mentioned reading the book Waking Up White by Debby Irving. That book led me to some incredible revelations that I’d never noticed before. The power of the author’s story helped me widen my perspective significantly. Over the past week or so I’ve been put some of the ideas to work and have been happy with the results. For clarity, the widening of my perspective led to different actions than I would have taken before reading the book.

On my drive home from Eau Claire today I had a choice to make. I could listen to a wonderful fiction or I could continue to widen my perspective. It took a moment, but I made the right choice and started White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. In a short period of time I started to see how this would help in similar and yet different ways from Waking Up White and I was immediately glad I started listening to it.

At the time when certain others I may have blogged about recently start taking action to block certain types of diversity training it is more important than ever for all of us to learn what blind spots we may have in our perspective. If anyone has interest in discussing these books and some of the ideas they’ve learned from them please let me know, I’d love to have that conversation! If there are other books you’d recommend to help continue to widen my perspective please let me know, I’d love to queue them up!

My Facebook memories from today left me smiling from ear to ear. Two years ago my buddies and I had one of our more epic weekends together up in Minneapolis. The entire weekend was full of hanging out, chilling, joking, gaming, and just existing with each other. It was awesome!!!

Seeing this picture reminded me of how grateful I am for all of the times we’ve gotten together to hang out in real life (IRL) as we have. COVID and social distancing has prevented us from getting together IRL, but it can’t take away all of the great memories we’ve already created together.

After dinner tonight we went for a walk as a family. It was cold, dreary, rainy, and was getting dark earlier than normal, but I could’ve cared less. This tradition we’ve started through COVID is something I look forward to doing many nights each week. For a brief pause there is no news, there are no phones, there is no COVID, and there is no stress. There is only 100% focused family time while doing physical activity. How awesome is that?

Thanks!!!