Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

We enter a world we didn't create.

We grow into a life already provided for us.

We arrive in a complex web of relationships with other wills and destiny that are already in full operation before we are introduced.

If we are going to live appropriately,

we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another.

Welcome back to speaking with joy, everyone. I am so excited to welcome you on to this week's episode,

where we will be exploring the idea of heritage. All of us in the world are given these stories

that began before we entered into them, the stories of our parents and our grandparents, of our communities, of our environment, our health, our emotional life,

the things that we think are possible and impossible are oftentimes shaped by the heritage that we are given.

But does this mean that we are bound to that heritage? Can we shape it or change it? Or are we kind of

bound in a deterministic way to the stories that came before us? I don't think we are. I think we have

the capacity to choose, the agency to shape what heritage we hand on to the world around us,

to the children we have, and to even to our friends.

So this is the general theme that we will be talking about today.

And I have the great pleasure of welcoming my friend Kristen on today to chat with me about these ideas.

So welcome on to speaking with Joy, Kristen.

Thank you. Glad to be back.

Yes. And Kristen and I talked about this time last year.

We did.

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