Be Open. Minding the Gap. On Poetry
The Future Does Not Fit in Containers of the Past. Edition 5.
Welcome to the fifth issue of this free newsletter. Since the first issue on August 16, the bohemian and eclectic nature of the topics covered ( strategy, culture, leadership, re-inventing marketing ( on the back of an envelope at that) but also jazz, libraries, love, loss, learning has resonated. As of this morning five weeks since its start the newsletter has 1,715 subscribers…
1.Be Open
Today, like never before there is a pull towards being closed.
Our online media diets tend to be polarized as streams of algorithmic feeds optimized to engage, addict and make us feel good about ourselves may leave us believing that the stink of some of our more flatulent thoughts have the aroma of Chanel No.5
Many politicians want to build walls, exit multi-state treaties and organizations, demonize the other, look away from reality, facts and truth.
Nationalism rises despite all the big challenges and opportunities are global in nature.
Let us start with the letter C.
Covid-19 is global. Climate Change is global. China’s impact is global.
Two new books (one looking back and one imagining forward) build the case for openness.
The Economist which reviewed Johan Norberg’s book says…
“Open” is clear, colourful and convincing, marshalling evidence from a range of eras and civilisations. The Roman Empire ceased to prosper when it ceased to be open. Christianity became the established religion, and sought to crush all others. “This new intolerance…led to vicious conflicts…between Christians and pagans, who saw their old gods being banned and their temples torn down.” Persecuted pagans joined Rome’s enemies, even welcoming barbarian invaders as liberators.
Human history, in Mr Norberg’s telling, is a cacophony of drawbridges being lowered and then raised. Mathematics and medicine flourished under the cosmopolitan Abbasid caliphate, but froze when religious conservatives won control. By driving out Jews, Muslims and heretics, he argues, the Inquisition helped impoverish Spain (between 1500 and 1750 the Spanish economy actually shrank).
China’s Song dynasty, which welcomed Muslim traders, Indian monks and Persians, developed paper money, water-powered textile machines and the makings of an industrial revolution 400 years before the West. But later dynasties turned inward and stagnated. Ming officials smashed clever machines, banned overseas trade on pain of death and curbed movement within China itself. The Manchus were even worse: to prevent contact with the outside world, in 1661 they forced the whole population of the southern coast to move 30km inland. A century later the Qianlong emperor banned or burned any books that seemed sympathetic to previous dynasties, including a great encyclopedia of economic and technical matters.
Matthew Ygleisias imagines forward and builds the case that if the United States wishes to be a dominant power in the future when facing a billion strong China (about to become the worlds largest economy in five years) or a fast growing billion person India it should be far more open to immigrants and even with 600 million new people, we will be less dense than France or Germany are today.
As someone who grew up in India and has been to 22 cities in China I am not sure why their rise should be an issue because the world is not a zero sum game except for the small minded. Up to 200 years ago these were the worlds largest and most powerful economies but a combination of colonization, strange politics and most importantly a failure to innovate and keep up with Science and Technology set them back. But, if the US is to remain as amazing as it has been it needs to remember its roots are in immigrants, a love of science and technology and freedom of thought and innovation all connecting with each other and the world.
Be Open.
To other ideas. To other perspectives. To other people. To other cultures.
2.Minding the Gap
Yesterday I attended an online talk from London by Alain de Botton of The School of Life.
He talked about his new book “An Emotional Education”
He noted that while many people teach skills and expertise very few people focus on how to live an emotional life. He decried much US self-help books that believe in the achieving perfection and having it all.
Today in the Instagram age so many of us try to be pixel perfect. But life is not pixel perfect.
In fact most of life is “minding the gap”
The gap between who we are and what we want to be
The gap in communication between any two people.
The gap between what we say/project externally and what we believe/live with internally
The most contented people tend to be those who have narrowed this gap or being aware of it find ways to accept that life is incomplete, imperfect, often incomprehensible.
They are authentic, trustworthy, happy within themselves not needing constant external validation and have strong relationships and connections with people. They are vulnerable, empathetic and constantly growing ( often making mistakes as they do)
There are others who project power, fame and wealth but you begin to see that often many have the warmth of a toilet seat, all the external validation they have or seek does not fill the chasm of emptiness that echoes with hollowness and this truth burns and eats their inside even as they smile and blow kisses on the outside.
So what to do?
George Saunders the Author said “Err in the direction of kindness”
Today in the world we have much rage.
So best be kind
Kind to others and to yourself.
This is one way in helping mind the gap.
3. On Poetry
I have over 80 books or shelf and a half of Poetry books at home each of which I have significant parts over the past decades. ( Another stack you will note are all the books of Alain de Botton who I mentioned earlier in this piece)
Why?
Here are how some Poets have explained the importance of poetry ( I have picked different lines from different poets) …
Perhaps you have been banged about by recent events
It can help to say words, walking helps. Poems help.
The meaning of poetry is to give courage.
Poems restore to us what is deepest in ourselves. It consoles us.
Greatest poetry is written at the borders of what can be said. It makes a strong effort at expressing the unsayable.
Poems are perfect words in perfect order.
They help us see and feel as these lines which I have extracted from different poems by James Wright’s book “ The Branch will not Break” which all describe dusk in a midwest prairie farm. Each line is filled with a new way of seeing and whenever I am driving in the evenings outside of Chicago I sense things differently because of these lines. The sensing and seeing also helps me in my writing, my photography and in paying attention…
Silos creep away toward the West
The cow bells follow one another into the distances of the afternoon
The sun floats down, a small golden lemon dissolves in the water
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens.
And poems reminds us of the passing of time…
Time is an echo of an axe within a wood
The sunlight in the garden hardens and grows cold, we cannot cage the minute within its net of Gold
But one day I know it will be otherwise…
Of all the books of Poetry I have my favorite remains the first book I bought forty years ago which you can see through its wear and tear and is the one I would recommend to anyone wanting to discover the beauty of Poetry. Start with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dylan Thomas . It was published first in 1952. Its author died in 1964. You can still get it on Amazon and in most book stores…
Rishad Tobaccowala ( @rishad ) is the author of the bestselling “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” published by Harper Collins globally in January 2020. It has been described as an “operating manual” for managing people, teams and careers in the age we live in and The Economist Magazine called it perhaps the best recent book on Stakeholder Capitalism.Rishad is a sought after speaker and advisor who helps people think, feel and see differently about how to grow their companies, their teams and themselves. More at https://rishadtobaccowala.com/