A time for change // 03.31.22

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[ Transcript ]

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about reimagining life through creativity and community. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Laura: This month, we’re celebrating 2 years of Shelter in Place, the podcast that has gotten us through the pandemic and that we hope has made the hard days feel a little bit brighter. We kicked off the month with instructions on how to fix the world from my son Gabriel, who has in many ways grown up with Shelter in Place. His birthday fell on the first day of this podcast—and the pandemic. Then we featured the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Deorr, who was my very first creative writing teacher 22 years ago, and has been incredibly supportive of both me and of Shelter in Place. We spent the two weeks after that doing a retrospective through our first two seasons, which took us through pandemic breakdown and launched us onto a journey across the country and back in search of home. Today, we’re closing out the month with a big announcement, one that’s had us feeling lighter and more hopeful than we have in a while.

Our announcement is this: just as we’ve been reimagining life through creativity and community these past two years through our Shelter in Place episodes, we’ve come to a point where we’re reimagining Shelter in Place itself.

For two years and 200 episodes, we’ve been doing our best to bring some joy and hope into your lives. We’ve talked about that in so many different ways—finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. Coming together in a world that pulls us apart. Reimagining life through creativity and community. Escaping not out of life, but into it.

But as we came into 2022, we felt a pull toward something bigger, a change that would allow us to find the rest we realized we needed in our season 3 episode “Letting the Light In.” I needed a way to give myself enough time and space to know when to be productive, and when to slow down, which I talked about in Stuck on the Staircase and Productivity Unhacked.

We came into 2022 already tired—and Omicron January didn’t help.

After 2 years of constant adaptation, of working too many nights and weekends, of forgetting how to get a good night’s sleep, I was starting to lose a little bit of the joy in this work.

I’ve asked my husband Nate often these past two years if he wants us to quit this work and just go back to being normal people with regular jobs. Sometimes that option looks really appealing—weekends off, knowing we’ll get paid, having benefits, maybe even getting to take a vacation once in a while. He’s been doing this work with me since partway through season one, and he’s tired too.

But each time he responded without hesitation, saying he used to wonder all the time if he was wasting his life away in advertising. He doesn’t wonder that now. And within seconds, I’m nodding along with him, because I feel that too, how the relationships we’ve gotten to build with our Kasama Collective trainees and Kasama Labs students are some of the most life-giving work we’ve ever been a part of. To borrow a phrase from our friend Scott Gullick and the season 1 episode “Type 2 Fun,” it’s not easy, but it’s good.

Still, we’ve known for a while that we needed a change, one that would give us permission to step off the treadmill and take a much-needed break. Our kids are about as proud of this work as we are, but they need us to take a break too, to slow down and be present with them while they’re still young enough to want us there.

So for many months now—in between the weekly episodes, in the margins of creating and teaching Kasama Labs and forming a Kasama Collective board of directors and applying to become a non-profit, squeezed in around grant applications and pitches to networks and potential sponsors, in the afterthought of speaking at conferences—always, we were thinking about what was next.

A big part of that conversation has been our name. While our kids have no baggage with the term Shelter in Place—they think that we came up with that cool name for our podcast—for the rest of the world, it’s a phrase that has become increasingly loaded as time as gone by. Shelter in Place is inextricably tied to the pandemic, to a time that has been embedded with so much loss and separation and death.

Even though we knew that this podcast was much bigger than the pandemic, our name anchored us to a time in history that many were ready to forget or move on from.

We came close to changing our name more than once, but each time there were reasons to hold off. A name change had the potential to be confusing. We also knew that while we would all very much like to be a post-pandemic world, for those who are immunocompromised or who have lost loved ones during this time, moving beyond the pandemic isn’t yet an option for them. And besides, if we were going to change our name, we needed to be absolutely certain that what we were changing it to felt right. We had a long running list of names we liked—but could never agree on one that felt quite right.

And then earlier this month on the morning of our 2-year anniversary, the name came to me like a gift, riding on the waves of a poem I’d never seen before. I told Nate, bracing myself for an objection, but instead he looked at me and nodded. “It’s perfect.”

In just six weeks, Shelter in Place will reach 200 episodes. It finally feels like the perfect time to close this chapter and begin a new one—one that we’ll share with you in our season 3 finale in May.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what Shelter in Place has meant to you these past two years. Tell us your stories of where you were when you heard an episode that you connected with. Share with us your favorite episodes. We’re inviting all of our listeners to submit what Shelter in Place has meant to you through a voice memo. We’ll include as many of those voice memos as we can in our finale episode, where we’ll unveil the name of the show that will carry the spirit of Shelter in Place, what we hope has felt like a Podcast Shelter, but with a future that is even more joyful and sustainable.

You’ll find a place to submit your voice memo in the show notes for today. We can’t wait to hear your stories, and to share with you why we’re feeling so hopeful about this next project.

In the meantime, we’re closing this month by looking ahead at the next one, and celebrating a podcast friend you heard from a couple of months ago.

April is National Donate Life Month, and so today we’re sharing with you an episode from the podcast 2 Lives. Back in January we featured the 2 Lives creator Laurel Morales in an episode called “Why We Need 2 Lives to Live One.” The episode of 2 Lives we’re sharing today is about a woman whose life is transformed when she learns that she needs a kidney transplant. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 13 people die every day in the U.S. waiting for a kidney transplant.

I heard this episode the first time the same week that my uncle received a kidney transplant from my cousin. In those hours when we were all waiting to see what would happen, this episode brought me inside that experience, and also gave me hope. Here’s that episode of 2 Lives now.

I hope you enjoyed this episode today from the podcast 2 Lives. You can check out more 2 Lives episodes at 2lives.org. That’s 2, like the number, l-i-v-e-s-dot-o-r-g. You can help both 2 Lives and Shelter in Place by leaving a 5-star rating and a quick review about why you enjoyed this episode.

Don’t forget to send us your voice memos of what Shelter in Place has meant to you for a chance to be included in our season 3 finale episode.

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Support Credits:

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around.

But first we’d like to thank {some of/one of} our newest supporters . . .

But first I’d like to tell you about another podcast I’m listening to right now that I think you’d like.

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End Credits:

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Melissa Lent is our project manager, Sarah Edgell is our design director, Nate Davis is our creative director, and as always, I’m your host and executive producer.

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.

OUTTAKE: