266: Making sense. Olga Tokarczuk. Arundhati Roy.
Good morning friends
This time last year, I decided to up my social media game. An Instagram page was created for the newsletter. Two things happened. One, it felt performative. Two, Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago. I decided it wasn’t me.
I am experimenting with using LinkedIn more actively. I still get itchy feeding the algorithm matrix. Still, it is a way to, well, share. I’m trying to do it my way. Which, ironically, sadly, means ignoring most of the ‘best practice.’
There are posts about kayaking and resilience, language as life’s lubricant, designing to deliver uncommon service, ways to spot bad strategy, and decluttering our work week.
I’ve drawn on literature to add some generative friction to the social scroll – Chimamanda Adichie on grief, Henry David Thoreau on ignorance, Es’kia Mphahlele on taking action, Audre Lorde on the costs of silence, Antjie Krog on celebrity, Caster Semenya on belonging.
I’ve tried to make them useful, non-performative, non-soundbite, and unclicky.
Basically, I am doing everything wrong. I’d love your feedback, so please comment. And, if you find them useful, please share them.
/strategy
Last week, I introduced Olga Tokarczuk’s 2019 Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator and promised we’d explore further.
I read a lot, and widely, for reasons Tokarczuk explains, “Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.”
My coaching helps leaders develop systems and mental models for leadership, life business. Literature gives us the closest proximity to the textures of life; to lead well, read well.
The lingua franca of our business lives are facts, graphs, slides; the boardroom equivalent of Instagram posts, they don’t tell the full story.
Businesses, sectors, markets, consumers are not only the labels we use to map them. Their facts connect in stories. Building our capacity to tell and understand story sharpens our strategic insight.
Read well, lead well.
//self
Tokarczuk says, “Life is created by events, but it is only when we are able to interpret them, try to understand them and lend them meaning that they are transformed into experience. Events are facts, but experience is something inexpressibly different. It is experience, and not any event, that makes up the material of our lives. Experience is a fact that has been interpreted and situated in memory… a certain foundation we have in our minds… a deep structure of significations upon which we can unfurl our own lives and examine them fully and carefully”.
Too often we get caught up in events, never pausing to make sense of or appreciate them. Life becomes a series of cell phone snaps caught in strobe lights. It is reflection that creates meaning and gives life life.
Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me was published a few weeks ago. She writes to make sense of mother, and her experience of her. It is a meditation on being human.
Arundhathi Roy’s mother died on 1 September 2022. The founder of a ground-breaking school, her headstone reads “Dreamer Warrior Teacher”.
During Covid, she despaired that her school would die. Roy reflects, “I wanted to hug and reassure her that everything would be OK. But you can’t hug a porcupine. Not even over the phone.”
She was devastated by her mother’s death.
She says, “I came undone”, and then decided, “If I could understand myself better, I’d probably understand a lot more about the world and certainly about my country, in which so many people seem to revere their persecutors and appear grateful to be subjugated and told what to do, what to wear, what to eat and how to think”.
To change your world, start with yourself.
Her brother was confused, “I don’t understand your reaction. She treated nobody as badly as she treated you.”
Roy thinks he was treated worse. After receiving their school reports — she did well, he did not –their mother woke him and took him to her room, where “she beat him until the thick wooden ruler broke… In the morning, she hugged me and said, ‘You have such a brilliant report.’ I was filled with shame. I hated myself. Since then, for me, all personal achievement comes with a sense of foreboding. On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room. If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.”
Her mother’s school carved a new path, “What she did for her girl students, was nothing short of revolutionary. She gave them spines, she gave them wings, she set them free. She bequeathed her unwavering attention and stern love on them, and they shone back at her.
That revolution, like all revolutions, came at a cost.”
Roy and her brother carried much of that cost, “It was almost as though for her to shine her light on her student and give them all she had, we – he and I – had to absorb her darkness.
Today, though, I am grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. It turned out to be a route to freedom, too.”
Roy reflects that the school was her mother’s last-born, “She loved, fought for and protected her youngest child with everything she had. That kind of focused, ferocious love, regardless of what it may choose as its object, is a blessed love. The challenge for those of us who are not chosen, and instead watch love pass us by, is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves”.
It’s incredible work.
I have quoted it at length, so you can experience its complexity.
Roy does not shy away from her mother’s cruelty. And she tries to understand her; “One of her school drivers said it best to me. ‘It’s only this crazy-lady style of Mrs Roy’s that will work in this Kottayam of ours.’ What he meant was that were it not for her rage and unpredictability, she, being a woman, would never have been able to run a school like hers in a town like ours.”
Mother Mary Comes To Me is a sense-making citadel. Roy does not diagnose, preferring to describe. She guides us into her feeling-world. And with that privilege, in that mirror, we understand ourselves a little better.
/// soul
I leave you with two quotations in tension.
Tokarczuk describes a photograph of her mother, seemingly lost in thought, perhaps sad: “When I later asked her about that sadness—which I did on numerous occasions, always prompting the same response—my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn’t been born yet, yet she already missed me. ‘How can you miss me when I’m not there yet?’ I would ask. I knew that you miss someone you’ve lost, that longing is an effect of loss. ‘But it can also work the other way around,’ she answered. ‘Missing a person means they’re there.’”
Damon Galgut, in his book, In a Strange Room, wrote, “Things happen only once and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory”.
Best wishes
Karl
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