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November 21, 2024
Dear University Community,
In late September, I opened my message to the university community with the following sentiment. “What a time. If you are paying attention, it would be easy to succumb to a sense of overwhelm. Retreating to our ideological corners seems easier than engaging others with diverse opinions. We all, to varying degrees, are seeking a semblance of certainty as things feel increasingly unstable.” I had no idea then how deeply those words would ring true at this moment, how much further afield the idea of certainty would be, and that feelings of instability would increase. Truly, what a time.
Amidst this unsettling reality many, craving stability, are turning inward. I get it. But there will be moments that require you to engage. Settings, like holiday gatherings, where a door opens to a conversation that cannot be closed. At that moment, before everything you have been holding inwardly explodes, I want to encourage you to turn to wonder. Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, reminds us that “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Choose, in advance, to respond to confrontation, disagreements, and acrimony with wonder. In this week’s video, Martha Guzman, author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, offers us another way to think about the heat that we feel rising in the midst of a tense exchange. Heat, she says, “in a conversation or disagreement is good…the friction it generates can be fantastic for what you can learn, understand, and illuminate. The difference is whether you are cooking something or burning something.” So, the next time you start to feel the heat rising, ask yourself, am I cooking or burning? To cook means to engage from a place of curiosity, not judgment. But, if you feel the burn and your anger is rising, it is important to step away. It doesn’t mean you won’t engage ever, but it is a recognition that you are not ready to engage now.
Being able to regulate, in real-time, to be calm and centered, and to show up as your best self takes work. Engaging across profound differences of opinions and beliefs takes work. But we cannot exist in community, in families, without it. So, whatever your plans for the holiday and end-of-year season, revisit all of the Ideas that Can Ignite Change, an opportunity to use them to show up better will appear.
We will restart this series in mid-January. Thanks for reading along and, more importantly, for putting the ideas into practice.
In service,
Enobong (Anna) Branch, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President for Equity and Professor
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