November 2020
Books read:
- Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage by Richard Stengel
- Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Trails walked:
- Barnhardt trail near Payson (November Nov 4th)
Song of the month:
- Landslide by Fleetwood Mac - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4M53xndqiU
Scientist Spotlight:
- Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna
So now we move on to our next adventure and another home to fill with memories. We closed on our new home in Colorado on the last day of November. Our timing has always been imperfect as we moved to Arizona in 1981 in the heat of July with no air conditioning in our old college-days cars; now we move to Colorado in the cold of December (luckily our cars do have working heaters).
Even with all the home related activities I managed to read books about Nelson Mandela and a racially diverse coming of age story. I also was able to go on one last Arizona hike with my daughter.....
Enjoy this month's somewhat shortened blog.
In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu – the profound
sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to
accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work
and achievements of others.
Nationalist forces everywhere are pushing back against
immigration and diversity, against anyone who looks different or worships a
different God. Democracy is in retreat. The world would be a better, safer, saner
place if leaders could only follow Mandela’s Way.
About Mandela: His manners are courtly – after all, he
learned them in colonial British schools from headmasters who read Dickens when
Dickens was still writing.
Courage is not the absence of fear, he taught me. It’s learning to overcome it.
Walks for him were a kind of meditation, and we usually walked in silence.
We think of temperament as something we’re born with. But in
Mandela’s case, it was something he formed.
As a young man, he was hot-headed and easily roused to anger. The man who emerged from prison was the
opposite and almost impossible to rile.
He knew that in many instances, his own views on individual
issues mattered far less than the democratic process – that it was better to
lose on an individual matter and allow democracy to win.
He knows that a transformational leader does not talk about
polls or votes or tactics but about principles and ideas.
When conditions change, you must change your strategy and your mind. That’s not indecisiveness, that’s pragmatism.
By behaving honorably, even to people who may not deserve
it, he believes you can influence them to behave more honorably than they
otherwise would.
Mandela had this to say about the art of persuasion: “Don’t
address their brains. Address their
hearts.”
In his most famous gesture of reconciliation, Mandela wore
the Springbok jersey and cap to the rugby finals at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park
Stadium in 1995. When he strode out
before the game to greet the team captain, the mostly white crowd began to
chant, “Nel-son, Nel-son!” It was one of the most electrifying moments in the
history of sport and politics.
One of Mandela’s fellow prisoners after talking with him: “That was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.”
The price of not saying no now makes it even harder to say
it later.
We should not let an illusion of urgency force us to make decisions before we are ready.
No one is as noble as the best things he has done or as
venal as the worst.
In April 1995, only a year into his first term, he remarked
that in 1999 he would be eighty years old and that “an octogenarian shouldn’t
be meddling in politics.”
He will fight and argue and attempt to persuade, but the
moment he realizes that his is not the practical or wise choice, he will simply
relent – and that will be that.
He almost always saw both sides of every issue, and his default position was to find some course in between, some way of reconciling both sides. In part this came from his deep-seated need to persuade and win people over, but mostly it came from having a non-ideological view of the world and an appreciation for the intricate spider’s web of human motives.
He is great because he has triumphed over his flaws, not
because he does not have them.
To those who would say that everything happens for a reason,
he would reply that we are the reason and we are the ones who make things
happen. There is no destiny that shapes
our end; we shape it ourselves.
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| Views east toward the trailhead |
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| Daughter at the Instagram tree |
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| Me at the Instagram tree |
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| Cliff that was a waterfall in March of 2019 |
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| Views west into the heart of the Mazatzals |
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| Rock rambling |
The story starts with the unnamed narrator being flown from
New York to London to hide out in an apartment while the yet to be determined humiliation
of what’s happened to her dies down.
Then the story rewinds to 26 years earlier when the narrator first meets
Tracey at a dance class, another brown girl like herself with one white parent
and one black parent. Their friendship
and subsequent falling out form the basis of who the narrator is and how she
views herself. The story flips back and
forth in time and across oceans from London to New York to West Africa in an
epic coming of age story that includes references to Fred Astaire, Michael
Jackson, corrupt African presidents, a Madonna-like pop star, the influence of
right wing Muslim terrorism in poor African villages, and the impact of
socio-economics and race on a person’s life. There is a short, inconsequential section in
the middle of the novel about the black employees at a pizza place watching a
tennis match between a black man and an Arab man. The owner of the pizza place was Arab, and
the storytelling is brilliant as they alternately cheered on their player. The novel is terrific. Here are some of my favorite lines:
What do we want from our mothers when we are children?
Complete submission.
My father had gone to meet nice leftist girls in short
skirts with no religion while my mother really was there for Karl Marx.
They shared a dry sense of humor and a mutual lack of
ambition, of which my mother took a dim view, in both cases.
In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient
history: they had never really had any
hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.
People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my
mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.
We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only
desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.
In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we
had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me,
never been called ugly or stupid, never entered theaters by the back door,
drunk from separate water fountains or taken our seats at the back of any
bus. None of our people ever swung by
their necks from a tree, or found themselves suddenly thrown overboard,
shackled, in dark water, -- no, in my dream we were golden!
While in an African village: As I poured a full liter of water down the drop toilet, to
flush out a cockroach that disturbed me, not one of the dozen young girls I
lived with ever let me know exactly how far she’d walked that day for that
liter.
They lived in the same flat and slept in the same room. Where else could they go? Real divorces were for people who had lawyers
and new places to live.
At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art
of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life once she’s
in it.
…devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence,
to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and
after a while it gets to you. Nannies,
assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers – women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.
Until next month have a Merry Christmas and happy Reading and Rambling!