President’s Message – Christmas 2021
With 2021 coming to a close, I want to thank you for your continued support of the IDA and to wish you and your families a warm and wonderful holiday.
I recently participated in the Town of Innisfil “Covid-19 Response and Recovery” initiative in which I was asked what three things we need to move forward from this pandemic.
I chose: Empathy, Resilience and Hope.
Empathy was, according to Forbes magazine, “the Number One Job Skill for 2020”. I believe it was the “Number One Life Skill for 2020”. As I commented earlier this year in an Innisfil Journal article, we needed ‘boatloads’ of it.
Resilience is what we needed to navigate 2021. Grieving the loss of so many and so much is how resilience is born. We needed the combination of empathy and resilience to take the necessary steps to manage the myriad of changes and challenges this past year has thrown at us all.
Hope is what we need for 2022. It is both tangible and intangible. It is both a mindset and a hard skill. Think about it: It is integral to how we approach, well, everything. We have changed. Hope is our anchor and our lighthouse. We need to continue navigating toward it. It will get us ‘home.’
In closing, I am reminded of a remarkable place my husband and I visited during our 2019 Ireland trip. Lauded as “one of the great gardens of the world,” Mount Congreve was the vision of one man: Ambrose Congreve, who lived until the age of 104. His ashes are buried in the ‘Classical Temple,’ on the banks of the River Suir. Engraved in that Temple are these words:
Sun and Shade by Turn
But Love Always