Sistering, the Best Part of Life
Last week we introduced March’s current invitation and offered a mindful ritual for checking in with how YOU are. Yes, you. (If you haven’t read it, we recommend clicking this link because everything we share below is best employed when you are feeling connected to yourself.)
We ended with a post script about the importance of reaching out to others. There is so much insight that can be gained when you step out of your own busy-ness, and extend the kindness of these three small yet genuine words.
Today we’d like to offer a carpentry term in the hopes that it emboldens us all to proudly check in with each other AND at the same time emboldens us all to more vulnerably lean into the support of others when we need it.
The following is an excerpt from Krista Tippett’s wonderful conversation on Un-becoming with Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle. Krista points out that Abby and Glennon have a kindred language, Abby talks about the need to “champion” each other and Glennon uses the language of “sistering” each other, which sets Glennon up to share this beautiful definition of sistering:
There’s this thing happens in carpentry where the mainstay of a building is a joist. Every once in a while, the joist starts to weaken because there’s a load put on top of it that’s too heavy. When that happens, they say, “OK, bring some extra boards.” And they put an extra board to the right of the weakening joist, and if that doesn’t make it strong enough, then they bring another board, and they put it to the left of the weakened joist. With an extra board to the right, and an extra board to the left, the joist becomes strong enough to withhold any load. Do you know what that carpentry system is called? Sistering. It’s like the guy carpenters were like, “Oh, we can’t name this ‘brothering.’ That’s too much intimacy there. That looks more like what the ladies would do.”
[laughter]
But it’s just the most beautiful, to me, example of how women support each other — and for life, because sometimes the load on us just gets too heavy to carry by ourselves, and the mistake we make when that happens is we think that we’ve done something wrong. We think we’ve made a mistake; we’ve gone wrong somewhere, because it can’t be this heavy.
But if we never had to ask for help because we couldn’t carry the load anymore, then we would miss out on the best part of life, which is just sistering and being sistered.
In honor of embracing the best part of life, sistering, we are releasing our Stronger Together design, which was created in 2017 as Of Note’s holiday card. Reserve yours here!