The most direct, effective, and sustainable means
Of creating diversity, equity, and inclusion in any community or institution
Is to treat everyone with the same fundamental level of respect, dignity, compassion, and curiosity.
How this occurs is through navigating a consent process that is direct, dynamic, affirmative, active, and mutual.
Anything less is the expression or creation of cultural scar tissue.
“Sometimes, like Thanksgiving, I miss the people that have inhabited my past like nothing else in the world.
But the past is a country that we will never visit again. Get letters occasionally, yes!….scrapbooks, photographs, and tall tales.
To the future, we are foreigners that do not yet speak the language. It is ours to create (and be created) from the present in which we live.
The balance lies not in the polarity of the external dialogue, but in having the internal buoyancy of gratitude outweigh the lump of sorrow for the lives gone from ours.
Thank you for sharing part of your life with mine.
Let this gratitude give us the clarity and courage to grow a little wiser…a bit less regretful…and a whole lot more joyful!”
