the Hope & Inspiration Book Club…
The date was - April 17, 2020…
The pandemic Delivers a way to connect via a virtual book club.
So March 15th, 2020 is when the pandemic sort of got real for me. My son and wife moved from being on Spring Break to online education. In the 2013 timeframe I struggled with depression and I’ve been on a journey to learn as much as possible about mental health and how I got to that state and how to avoid it like the plague (pun not intended here).
One thing I realized early on in the pandemic was that most of society was ill equipped for serious trauma and I had a feeling the pandemic was going to be one traumatic experience. So I started doing daily meditation videos on Facebook to try to plant the seeds for adding meditation to your daily practices or success habits as this was one tool that helped me in my worst times.
Beyond mindfulness, I built a really strong reading habit. I eventually built it up to an hour or more a day of reading. This habit exploded my annual book consumption to over 100 books a year for 3+ years. Anyhow, reading healthy and positive and hopeful and inspirational books was another powerful tool that helped me break-free from my depressive state.
So on April 17, 2020, I decided to try to build a book club as a way to offer hope and inspiration and virtual community to those needing it during the crazy times we were heading into. Looking back almost 2 years later, I had no idea what we were going to be dealing with – we had awful polarity related to the pandemic, mask wearing, and vaccinations, as well as politics, race relations, gun control and even a coop and insurrection against our government and democracy.
No one could have guessed all this stuff. We are having record highs of suicide, abuse, and divorces not to mention kids are falling so far behind in school due to reinventing the education system on the fly. As you can see, we as a society, are in desperate need of hope and inspiration. This is why I started this group.
How things Started -
Man's Search For Meaning…
To kick things off I thought we might start with a real powerhouse of books when it comes to inspiration – Viktor Frankl’s amazing book about his experience surviving a concentration camp in World War II. In my own exploration of wellbeing and resilience, life purpose was one thing I found that also helped me personally. I had my own purpose defined before the pandemic and this book helped me see how important this idea was.
My purpose is to challenge people to become innovative leaders so we can change the world together. Boy the pandemic gave me the perfect opportunity to test and live this purpose. Anyhow, this book is pure brilliance in my opinion and we had some deep discussions on Frankl and his awful journey and how he was able to survive and thrive in spite of the most difficult life he was thrown into.
I highly recommend this book it truly is one of the greatest books in my opinion. You can buy it here if you have not read it yet or pick it up at your local library.
Here is Frankl talking about the importance of having purpose in life.
The world Was Changing Before Our Eyes Daily And White Fragility Was Now Being Studied
By May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered in public on the streets by a police officer over a petty crime. Granted police work is stressful and the police are greatly under trained to deal with the stresses they face on a daily basis. We must explore new ways as this example blew up and turned the world conversation to racism and race education.
Soon after this we moved from Man’s Search For Meaning to White Fragility in the thick of this awful situation happening in the thick of a global pandemic. I will also say these issues may have been fueled by the stress faced by the pandemic, but it was still only a few months in.
Reading White Fragility was the hight of this group’s engaged membership. We had both black and brown people join a mostly white group to discuss the effects of racism in society. It was a powerful time and a powerful group. We learned a lot from each other.
One Cannot Just Be - "NOT Racist", one Must Work Towards Being Antiracist…
August 6th we started How To Be An Antiracist to just blow the doors of things related to what many of our society, or at least what I, knew about systemic racism. We learned how conditioned we are to racism and where we participated, ignorantly.
We were lifting some heavy weight here and again it was a powerful group digging into this heavy topic. I can tell you though we were burning out a bit and learning how the system is set up and how racist most folks are was a heavy cross to bear.
I found the work we were doing hopeful, but this certainly opened our eyes up to how much work there was in this area. Many doubled down and read more books in this space and kept pushing to dismantle systemic racism.
I can tell you I am a different person for reading these books and in my eyes, a much better person. I would say it opened up a lot of eyes as we explored these difficult topics. I also will say it helped me work even harder to dismantle racism.
What do We Do Now?
Get In To Good Trouble!
As the reading was getting challenging we needed some more inspiration so we watched and discussed the wonderful documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble. So we were learning about how systemic racism was intentionally built in the system and society, and the question that kept coming up was… “but what can I do?” So we explored what others have done. John Lewis is a true inspiration.
The Reason there will be no change is Because the people Who stand to lose from change have all the power…
…and the people who stand to gain from change have none of the power.
We then moved on to Poverty, Inc another documentary exploring how non-profits are potentially harmful and how as we learned earlier in our work that poverty actually leads to crime and violence in our society. This was a way to explore how we can work toward ending poverty, crime, violence and how this all falls at the feet of the BIPOC communities and they sadly become “thugs” and “murderers” and the scapegoats for the evils of society.
By October we needed some hope and inspiration which lead us to the book of joy
Here is a podcast interviewing the writer who worked with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.
So as you can see we are a group that takes on powerful and difficult topics and have created a safe-space to discuss these topics together. Real joy is another thing like freedom that at times seems illusive.
The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu created a gift to the world and helped us learn to live a better life. It was truly inspiring. Our group started shrinking a bit, but we had and still have a solid small group we’ve ended the year on such a strong note. As with all the books and documentaries on this list, I highly recommend each one.
In November I added a Gratitude Challenge as well complimenting the regular reading
So to build in a practice of positivity we also participated in practicing gratitude for many days in November. It was not just reading, but trying to practice hope and inspiration in the community.
Furthering Buddhist Thoughts on Living Our Best Life by finding The Buddha Within
Again, this group is a challenge at times and we’ve all been pushed a bit to explore new ideas and topics and ways to stretch ourselves. This book was fairly deep at looking into Buddhism which can be heavy for the non-buddhist or newbie to buddhism. It does explore the Noble Eightfold Path and ideas on walking this path which is very powerful.
And the world keeps changing and the political environment was Getting even more Heated
We started learning about politics and how to be more engaged in our political communities. We Are Indivisible is a book teaching lessons on how to get more engaged locally and working towards doing more than just voting as a way to make change in our society.
Then we moved on to the history of Nonviolence
This brought us to what nonviolence is and how it’s been used in history. This book covers a ton of areas in history that used nonviolence to make positive change in the world. As this is a different approach than we often fall back on this was very enlightening.
Starting in January we're moving on to Civil Resistance
Here is an overview of the author of this book and her TED Talk.
So obviously we’ve covered a lot of topics and not always easy topics. You might be asking… is this really hopeful or even inspirational? To that I’d say it depends. If you like reading several books a year this may be hopeful as few people read 3-4 books a year. Half of Americans read less than 4 books a year so this book club helps you add 3-4 new books a year to your reading habit. That is hopeful in my eyes.
Beyond this we are a consistent group. We’ve been meeting weekly for since April 2020. Even at our smallest, we’ve always had 3 members committed to showing up and bringing deep conversations related to interesting and challenging topics. We have 69 members currently and so things fluctuate depending upon the book. We will continue building and inviting new folks in as community is just as important as reading in my eyes.
I think beyond building a success habit or regular reading that you commit to, connecting with other people to discuss these books adds another thing we need more of – community. During the pandemic we’ve become more and more isolated overall and community and connecting with other people is actually really good for your mental health. The relationships we’ve built have been really wonderful.
So if you are ready to add some hope and inspiration to your life in 2022, please join the group. We look forward to getting to know you and exploring so interesting topics with you. I can guarantee if you put in a year with us, you’ll be a different hopefully a little better person by the end of 2022. That’s something to get inspired about. We can all use a group helping us be a little bit better.
