You've Got This!

10Find Your UpliftConnect to people who help you rise

I will never forget the outpouring of love in the weeks and months following my brother Peter’s death. I felt carried along by an invisible current of love; my whole family did.

Numerous times people asked me, ‘How are you doing?’

I was sad, of course. Profoundly sad. Yet amid the sadness lay something beautiful: a sense of deep connectedness, of community, of compassion.

I told people that I felt ‘lifted up’ and ‘carried along’ by love. It sounded corny to my ears, yet it felt like truth. How does love lift us up? How does community carry us along? How does connectedness fuel our courage — not just in hard times, but at all times?

I don’t know exactly how. I just know it does.

As Bishop Michael Curry said during his impassioned sermon at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry: ‘There is a power in love.’

I would expand this and say that there is a power in all human connection. That every genuinely caring relationship — whether between friends, colleagues, clients or mere neighbours — carries an invisible current of energy that exceeds the sum of the parts. A power that can lift us up and carry us further than we could ever go alone. Organisational psychologists refer to this as ‘emotional contagion’; the transmission of energy from one person to the next which has the power to spread like a virus … for better or for worse.

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE VALUE OF FRIENDSHIPS IN SURVIVING DIFFICULT TIMES.

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