Hello Readers,

Happy Equinox and northern Spring 🌱! Happy New Year — Nowruz 🐟🍎! And March 20 is also International Day of Happiness!

Read on for a few reflections and 3 tools to stay calmer in the chaos. Click here if you’d like the newsletter as it comes out, and into your email inbox.

We are in chaotic times, but it’s the time of year when light is overcoming darkness, when we’re emerging from our hibernation to sunlight and growth and action. Given the important and multi-faceted symbolism of this day, I encourage you to channel joy and generosity. Always, and especially in times of chaos, channeling joy keep us connected to calm clear thinking, kindness, and each other.

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” attributed to I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, 1984.

In the vein of facing challenges and chaos, and of our Nobel Chemist’s quote above, I’m sharing three things to help us along the journey to becoming and remaining “islands of coherence.”

  1. 📝the 4 slides from my 15 minutes talk at WIAD- “3 Tools to calm the chaos, connect to hope, and spread the light”✨ — the overview + 1 for each tool.
  2. 🪄Here is my LinkedIn post describing World Information Architecture Day on March 8, 2025 — the very fun and enlightening conference I got to facilitate as well. The conference theme was “Challenges of Change: Adapting Information Architecture for an Evolving World.” If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Information Architecture (IA), think of how information is organized, categorized, and made accessible, in a library or on a website, and how user friendly and accessible it is (or isn’t) — that is the core of IA.
  3. 🕯️🚺And here’s a <1minute excerpt from a short talk I got to give last week, about Women’s History Month, and what feminism is and wants-gender equality. We want for both women and men to have equal access to jobs whether in the caring or the analytical professions, both women and men to have equal access to recognition for their contributions, both women and men to learn and be allowed to express their thoughts and feelings. And that we each had to tend to our inner light, show people the light we see in them, and sharing our light helps others around us to shine their lights brighter, with. And my partner in this, then shared the story of a mentor helping out her mentee, lighting her candle… neither are diminished, and both burn brightly. And from Stefanie’s illustrative candle, a few lit their own, and we passed it on. The room became a sea of lights, as we all, women and men, lit, relit and shared the 🔥.

📰And if you’d like to check out the last newsletter on overcoming the challenges of keeping resolutions, you can check it out here. In it, I also shared a friend’s link to my humor-, story-, and statistics- filled article on corporate wellness in resource-stretched environments, and why & how the investments provide ROI. We have to stay well, to stay clear-thinking, creative, connected-to-our-why, and productive. Focusing not on racing away from the whip, but on what fuels us, and draws us forward.

Happy spring, and keep fueling through. Let me know how you celebrate International Day of Happiness.
Thanks for reading.

Rachel