“The best ideas are born on napkins. What’s yours?”
Yet again, Southwest Airlines keeps their reputation as purveyor of all things pithy and clever. After receiving this napkin on a recent flight, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the form mirroring function: encouraging passengers to be pithy and clever by being pithy and clever.
I love the constrains of the elevator pitch – if you have the shortest time possible, how do you distill your thoughts and ideas down to a few short sentences? How can they fit on a napkin?
So here are some of my thoughts from the elevator or from the back of napkins. Consider it like tapas: a collection of small plates. Enjoy!
I Vote Because…
I’m signing up to write letters this election season with Vote Forward in their Get Out The Vote campaign to reach out to voters in swing states.[1] The idea is that we write letters over several weeks or months, then mail them all on the same day. In 2020, I wrote 70 letters. And this year, I plan to write many more!
The organization gives a printable template with the prompt: “I vote because…” with a small space to hand-write our reason to vote. So I either write really small or condense all my thoughts as succinctly as I can. Here’s a draft that I’m starting with.
I vote because:
Voting is the great equalizer. No matter how much money or influence other people have, we each get one vote. And it’s ultimately the vote that counts. I may not like the vitriol of election season, but that gives me even more reason to vote because I don’t want to leave our democracy to the loudest or most polarized voices.
Cellphones
Everyone’s talking about the surgeon general’s op-ed that social media platforms need warning labels. This came out the same week that LA Unified School District voted to enforce a cell phone ban in schools.
I’m in the middle of reading Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I’ll definitely have more to say on this book in a future post. But an early punchline is that we have become overprotective of children/teens in public and under-protective of them in the online world. As we speak, I’m reaching out to like-minded parents to see about minimizing cell phone use in my kids’ own schools.
Healing Waters
I just finished reading Enchantment by Katherine May. Every time I sat down to read it, I felt more peaceful and, well, enchanted by the way she chooses to see the world. May describes going to an ancient healing well and her mix of reverence and her own awkwardness at not being sure how to connect to a former site of pilgrimage and healing.
I couldn’t help but think how meaningful it would be to visit such a spring, to feel connected to the earth and to generations of people who turned to this place for wholeness. Then I happened to be driving by University High School and saw the sign for Kuruvunga Village Springs, a naturally occurring spring that has drawn inhabitants for over 8,000 years.
I’ve heard about the springs, the cultural center, and the preservation efforts but have never been. So to follow Katherine May’s lead, I’m committing to visit the site on one of their open days and to be open myself to see what the springs and the community have to say.
Nutella Sandwiches
For those keeping score at home, the Nutella sandwiches have already been a big hit! And every time the kids eat them, the proclaim enthusiastically, “It’s a summer tradition!”
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~What I’m reading~
Enchantment by Katherine May
Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
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[1] Vote Forward is a nonprofit organization that empowers grassroots volunteers to send handwritten letters encouraging fellow Americans to vote. Vote Forward’s flagship voter contact program trains and supports volunteers writing personal, heartfelt letters to potential voters with an easy-to-use online platform. The majority of our letter-writing campaigns are nonpartisan campaigns, supporting our core 501c(3) and 501c(4) social-welfare mission, which focus on mobilizing potential voters in communities that have historically been marginalized in the political process—such as people of color, women, and young voters.