This year, make time for moments of peace

The new year brings an opportunity for reflection and respite. I hope you find peace in some of the spaces and projects created by your colleagues.

As the first month of 2023 comes to a close, I invite each of you to take a moment to pause, not for your work but for yourselves. The new year’s resolutions and ambitions are admirable but can quickly overwhelm us or leave us feeling disappointed if we do not reach our goals. This is not just a time to forge ahead but also an opportunity to reflect and rejuvenate.

There are spaces and projects across our institution designed to suspend time and allow meditation on what each of us brings into this new year, the people who are here to see it with us, and those we have lost. I hope you find solace in these spaces, both physical and not:

With support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, this month the Asian Pacific American Center released an album across music streaming platforms titled Bravespace. This compilation of songs by Asian American women and nonbinary artists offers listeners a “refuge for contemplation, grief, and growth.” The work was commissioned at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst an alarming uptick in violence against Asian communities, sadly all too relevant three years later. The album includes songs from diverse artists with varied styles, offering a sense of catharsis and hope. The musicians, artists, and cultural practitioners involved in the project worked to capture how intensely challenging moments might lead to personal discovery and ultimately, to collective healing.  

For a more physical meditation on the passing of time and the temporal nature of our world, those of you in Washington, D.C., can visit the Renwick Gallery’s ongoing exhibition 1.8. The artwork is inspired by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, which was powerful enough to shift the earth on its axis and shorten the day by 1.8 millionths of a second. The art piece is a massive web of colorful netted and braided fiber suspended from the ceiling of the Renwick Gallery’s Rubenstein Grand Salon. Below it, there is space for visitors to lie on the carpet and watch changing lights cast shadows and illuminate colors across the always-shifting form.

One last reflective space close to my heart is the Contemplative Court at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. When we designed the building, I felt it was important to offer a place for visitors to sit with the complicated and painful history to which they had borne witness. The room—which houses a cylindrical fountain in which water rains down from around a skylight and into a reflecting pool below—gives visitors a place to sit, to listen to the water, and to remove themselves from the hum of the world outside. While the space was designed with the preceding exhibits in mind, it is also a place for reflection of any kind. So many of us work to tell difficult truths about our history, our present, and our future; all of us face individual and collective challenges in our personal and professional lives. Sometimes we do not even realize the weight we carry until we lay it down.  

I recognize that sometimes a moment of reflection is an insufficient reprieve from life’s challenges. The Smithsonian Institution offers its employees mental health benefits, including confidential one-on-one counseling sessions at no cost for employees and members of their household; online resources to connect employees with childcare and elder care resources; and webinars on mindfulness sessions, financial health, child mental health, and more. Our mental health resources are detailed here and our human resources team is available to answer any questions should they arise.

I am immensely grateful to be a part of the Smithsonian family. I know that our work can be emotionally overwhelming and time-consuming; our well-being must be prioritized if we are to reach our full potential. This year, please take the time you need to care for yourselves and your families and take full advantage of our mental health benefits should you need them.

Most of all, I hope that each of you can carve out time to find enjoyment and peace in one another’s work. It is my hope that the resources across this institution—the exhibits, the artwork, the spaces for reflection—can offer our staff the same respite they provide the public.  

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