The Last Email Of The Year
Good morning friends
This is our last email for the year.
Thank you for reading, for all the times you’ve reached out to me, for the times you’ve gifted me with suggestions that have enriched my knowledge, for inspiring me to do this work.
Thank you especially to my clients. In our work, you help me shape what is said here. It would be impossible without you and the wisdom that you share with me.
Like last week I have been uncertain what to say today. What is there to say in a year like this?
I haven’t wanted to repeat what you would’ve read and heard in so many ways in the past weeks and months.
I was tempted to give you my favourite books of the year, or the top emails of the year. That, too, felt inauthentic.
This has been a year of pain. It has also been one of joy.
This moment has forced a vulnerability on us all. And in that we have found new ways of relating, and new depths of appreciation.
There is fear and hope.
It is, as it always is, inexorably complex…and simple…
And so, in today’s email, I decided we would visit the complexity of life. Hopefully, in remembering that it is so, that life is complex and contradictory, we can hold it more lightly.
/ STRATEGY
On Monday Maria Popova’s wonderful blog Brainpickings reminded me that it was the anniversary of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture.
In it, Morrison tells the story of a group of young people who arrive at a blind clairvoyant’s home, ostensibly determined to expose her as a fraud.
The clairvoyant turns them back on themselves, confronting them with the maliciousness in their efforts.
Morrison draws us into the clairvoyant’s thoughts, and we find ourselves cheering for her wisdom. She says,
“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge…it must be rejected, altered and exposed…Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.”
How do we resist the power of her thoughts?
We can’t, until Morrison brings the young people back in. They feel trivialised, unheard and hit back from their wounding.
They ask, “Why didn’t you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become (?)”
Their indignation builds. They implore her, “Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.”
Our sympathies are swung. They weren’t trying to trick her. Yes, they goaded her but in truth they wanted her to share her wisdom. They didn’t have the language to ask, it was only in the heat of their embarrassed anger that they found the words.
The old clairvoyant teaches us that language can brutalise and close possibility. The youngsters remind us that it is also a source of hope, that we can create the future in our words.
Morrison closes her lecture with the clairvoyant’s words, “Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together”, leaving us holding the fact that in speaking and listening they find each other. In language they, who have never lived, come alive and teach us.
Morrison says, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
This is a time for connection.
Use words that build belief and unravel fear.
Take the time to speak your truth, and to listen to that of others, to connect, so that you too may say “how lovely it is, this thing that we have done together.”
/ SELF
In the afterword to his book The Night Trains, esteemed South African historian Charles van Onselen reflects that his high school principal had told his parents that they should not spend any money sending their ‘very average son’ to university. No doubt they came to think he was correct, as van Onselen describes ten years of “largely unsuccessful attempts at university to discover some – any intellectual competence and coherence” before he “stumbled into a love affair with history.”
Van Onselen is today an A-rated social scientist and the author of multiple award-winning books. I include his story, because for many of us, this year has not been one of success. It has been a year to make one feel incompetent. Yet, as van Onselen’s story shows us, a life can evolve. It is never over, until it is. You can always reshape, restart, redirect and revive. It is possible.
/ SOUL
Gifty, the protagonist in Yaa Gyasi’s novel The Transcendent Kingdom, says this, “It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding rows, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, at the nature of ‘what we can handle’ changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
It has undoubtedly been hard to live in this world, and there’s freedom in admitting that.
It’s okay to say that it’s been hard. And then to celebrate, or at least acknowledge that in being here, in reading this email, in discussing these thoughts with ones you love, that there is a miracle in life. You are here.
I had told you last week that we were headed to Chef Charné Sampson’s Epice in Franschhoek.
The kitchen is energised with the same hope that Morrison’s young people carried. I don’t think there was anyone over the age of thirty, and yet the food carries the ancient memories. It brings the old flavours of the Cape, which in turn speaks to an Indian Ocean ancestry, into this moment.
Those spices came here with pain and conquest, yet Sampson’s wizardry and that of generations before her, have created new possibilities. It is its own alchemy. Those spices now speak to the fruits of liberation.
Look around you, find the miracles that there are. They’re there.
Speak spells of love, create images of possibility, remind yourself that you are here, remember those who came before you. There is power in all of it. I will see you on the 10th of January.
With love
Karl
PS: I couldn’t resist… here are the two of the most popular mails of the year….What Good Leaders Look Like and Love the People You Lead, together with my personal favourite, Living with Loss.
(This letter was first published on 13 December 2020)