Tonight there is a community conversation centered around my book BLUSH: Women & Wine. In that book, I suggest that we all have our coping mechanisms of choice. Those ways in which we hide from our own lives, and distance ourselves from the things we’d rather not face, the feelings we’d rather not experience, and the parts of ourselves that we try to keep under lock and key. As I say in BLUSH,Wine has been my “thing”. For others, it may stake no claim, and I raise my glass to them. But. Something does. Whether addiction to our smart phones or binge watching the latest hit series, smoking pot or online shopping, perfectionism or endless productivity, serving others so that we can ignore ourselves, nightly cocktails or an overflowing social calendar, excessive exercise or a fist full of peanut butter cups, a common thread in the fabric of the human soul is the temptation to avoid pain and discomfort. But hiding from our life today only means running back into it again tomorrow, and the truth of the matter is, it takes so much more energy to run away from our life than to show up for it.
Rather than what is so often cast as a “book talk” byShowing the author, this one is a place to be in conversation with one another. A safe space in which to wonder together, what does it mean to show up fully for the life that is ours, and what prevents us from doing that? Our questions are our own to live. But there is something good that happens when we choose to live them together. There is safety in numbers. Going it together reminds us that we are not alone in our efforts to make sense of things.
So, tonight we will gather together, over glasses of wine (yep…still love the stuff) and share our stories. We are story tellers at heart, and we see ourselves in one another’s stories. My plan is to go first because someone has to. And I’ve learned that if I am willing to tell my story, it can give others the courage to do the same.
Let’s show up for life and tell our stories!
Cheers.
