21 Silver Linings
Counting our blessings has never been more important
2020. It’s a great name for a year — snappy, typographically arresting, with unique potential for puns about visual acuity. But, well, no. Almost as soon as the year began, we had to shelve our plans, our puns and our paintbrushes and sit forcibly in our homes while 2020 become one of the worst years in living memory.
And yet! In the spirit of the much-maligned Pollyanna and in the immortal words of Ian Dury, there were reasons to be cheerful.
At Greenspace, we help businesses to produce and communicate positive, lasting change. We call it ‘creating legacy’, and the message is this: please don’t wait until you’re retired or dead to leave your legacy; you can enact worthwhile actions that produce change in the world right now.
This year we are taking our own advice, and wrapping up the final weeks of 2020 with our own legacy project. Based on a chat with a client and a piece of advice from the World Health Organisation, we decided to create a website that helps us to count our blessings instead of wringing our hands.
We’ve called it 21 Silver Linings, and its mission is to invert frowns, thaw frozen cockles and inspire sheer, unadulterated optimism. Here’s how.
Newspaper headlines this year have of course been dominated by COVID-19. But in 2020, some members of our species accomplished feats even greater than successfully operating Zoom. Thanks to these over-achievers, glimmering from between the clouds of horrible headlines were uplifting stories of progress in the fields of medicine, zoology, politics, culture and the arts.
We decided to launch ourselves into the ‘solution-focused’ news domain and to kick things off, we asked our team members if they remembered any good news stories from this year. Out tumbled references to randy pandas, Scottish menstruation, and cancer breakthroughs.
It was possibly one of the most uplifting meetings we’ve ever had, which is why we want to share this with you. Another, science-backed reason for the project is that there is evidence that reading and sharing positive and so-called ‘solution-focused’ news boosts happiness and life satisfaction.
The World Health Organisation’s guidelines for coping with COVID-19 recommend that individuals “find opportunities to amplify positive news stories.” One Martyn Lewis must be dancing a merry jig around his living room while making rude hand gestures. For those old enough to remember 1993, this was when the erstwhile BBC newsreader suggested that the news should be less unrelentingly depressing, with positive stories sprinkled in to help to lift our spirits. He was publicly humiliated for being a fond fool, and shortly afterwards lost his job. Well, science has finally caught up and proved his instinct absolutely correct. Today, there is a proliferation of positive news websites, as well as ample research about their life-enhancing powers, and we are delighted to be joining in.
A website is a great start, but our ambitions for 21 Silver Linings go beyond the digital realm. The Greenspace team’s talents extend to print publications, exhibitions and experience design, so we have a 21 Silver Linings journal planned for the start of 2021, and something bigger beyond that. We want 21 Silver Linings to grow and develop into a virtual and real space for evidence-based optimism.
Yes, 2020 has been tough, but as 21 Silver Linings hopes to show, within it were sown the seeds of better times. And while 2021 is typographically ungainly, at least it rhymes with “plenty, plenty fun”. Here’s hoping… always.
