“Invite people into your life who don’t look or act like you. You might find they challenge your assumptions and make you grow.” Mellody Hobson
We have done a lot of socializing over the past two weeks ––– most of it in our home.
We hosted a wedding reception for Jen Brotherson—a family friend, my husband’s former student, and a former employee at Disruption Advisors—and her new husband, Austin Hillam. (I posted some photos on Instagram).
We hosted Kindra and James Heilpern. She grew up as an expatriate in Saudi Arabia; he is a lawyer turned entrepreneur, brimming with ideas, including how to continue to increase enrollment at Southern Virginia University. We also hosted our next-door neighbors, Alyson and Bennett Ross, who both epitomize what it means to be of service as neighbors and in the community.
These recent experiences are notable because we entertained a lot when our children were young. Nearly every Sunday, we had families over after church; we invited our neighbors into our home. But then, for a number of reasons, including the fact that life felt pretty hard for a few years, we didn’t.
I thought I hadn’t missed it.
But now, socializing in this way again, welcoming friends, neighbors, and even strangers into our home, I now realize that I had.
I’ve been thinking about the word receive this week, about receiving a gift, in particular.
I think that in order to receive something or someone, we need to provide people with the details for the emotional wire transfer so that it doesn’t bounce back. We need to open up our hands, open up our hearts, open our homes to receive that person. But we also need to open our mouths and communicate our willingness, or eagerness even, to receive that person as a part of our household and our lives. And our willingness needs to be enough to overcome our reticence and potentially theirs because being sociable makes us feel a little vulnerable.
It carries some risk.
Especially when we expand our circle to include people who are different from us or have other ideas and experiences in the world. Which we all need to do to grow.
Some prep work has been required to launch this new old S Curve of entertaining again. Because even with the emotional piece conquered, it requires physical effort to have people over. To begin with, I felt like the house wasn’t ready to entertain while we were decorating. Then there is always the house cleaning and feeling like you’re putting your best and most hospitable foot forward. There is shopping and cooking (thank you to my husband and daughter, who handle this facet of entertainment). And, of course, foregoing the more sedentary, seductive activities, like reading a book or watching the latest K Drama.
But, I am feeling especially buoyant this week, and that’s in part because there were delightful, interesting, kind people gracing our home in recent days. People who brought a piece of themselves into our world and kindly left some of it there with us.
Our guests have made our house feel even more like a home.
What about you?
Have you recently invited someone into your home? What was your experience?
Or….
What would you need to do to invite and receive someone into your home or world?
Or if not your home quite yet, just out to dinner?
This week’s podcast episode is with Shirzad Chamine, author of Positive Intelligence. I’ve done a deep dive into his work over the past few months and found it to be a wonderful complement to our work on managing the emotional aspect of change, so it was fun to have an opportunity to ‘invite him into my home’ via Zoom. Enjoy!
As always, thanks for being here!
My best,
Whitney
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