Our entry into the Spring season signals many things; that Winter is over, that we will finally have more daylight, and that our moods will collectively lift. But perhaps this year, the most important signal is that we are at last trudging out from underneath the muck of the last two years. This is a turning point where we have been granted an opportunity to sustain the changes we wanted and practiced over the past two years. We learned important lessons about collective purpose, caring, flexibility and patience. We learned to sacrifice our personal comforts for the safety of others while simultaneously joining movements for equity and justice. We achieved incredible things under the circumstances, and as the seasons change, we should make sure that we don’t fall back into our old habits. True, the thing that we craved most was normalcy, but let’s not falsely equate the normalcy of the past, with the normalcy of the future. Let’s create a new normal and lean hard into the lessons we just learned. Humans are indeed creatures of habit (Nilsen, et al., 2012; Mendelsohn, 2019), so this is not going to be easy, but with patience, flexibility, caring, and collective purpose, we can change our habits for the better at UMKC and beyond.

About the Arthor

Dr. Makini King, Interim Vice-Chancellor and Director of  the UMKC Division of Diversity and Inclusion