Schizophrenia, 6 Trains and Dropping a Story Line Before You Get Caught
January 31, 2013 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been keeping a notebook of my life as an entrepreneur, beginning with the new year. Its red leather, with big white pages.
It’s my adaptation of a Robin Sharma assignment. The goal is to more productive by through consciousness – the choice to actively pinpoint the thinking and the actions that take you off course from the kind of life you’re looking to have.
I had just finished writing in it as I stepped off the train at 2:43 on Thursday afternoon.
That was when the scene started.
I heard her before I saw her. She was mad.
“Evitar que se! evitar que se!’
When I got off the escalator I saw her swinging blows. She was all caught up beating the shit out of someone nobody else could see.
She cried out again. This time, in pain.
People watching in Manhattan works well one of two ways.
You can do it while you’re on the hustle, taking in your surroundings while you get to where you’re going.
You catch a lot that way in New York.
Or, you can do it when the folks you’re watching are doing something god awful, and you can’t bear to look away.
That kind works well because they’re too caught up in god awful doing to notice you.
I did both, that day – hustling and rubber necking together at Lex and 53rd.
I felt a lump in my throat.
There are lots of invisible someones crowding up train stations in New York. But, damn. This one was causing an unusual stir. Punching, twirling, grabbing, grappling, groping – this woman had her hands around an invisible neck! Then it was around hers! Back again!
I’ve read that schizophrenia rests in confusion about consciousness. John Campbell calls it a brain signal read as a someone you never consciously ceded power to, but took over anyway.
The real trick is that you thought you made a choice to go along.
I’ve been noticing trends as I write in my notebook. There’s people, and there’s shenpa – the Tibetan word for “getting hooked.” That’s when the going along happens. It starts in with something that didn’t matter much at all – a conflict, exchange, a tension. When I let it grow, it gets bigger. It gets too big.
That’s the deal with shenpa. You’re stuck on a thing, like a woman throwing punches on Lex and 53rd, and never boarding a train.
I get all clogged up that way, and the hours go places I don’t want them to. They go to things like confrontation and defense, explanation and argument, frustration and gossip. They go to intense emotion.
That’s the thing about social entrepreneurship – you don’t get to just go along. You have to be mindful of your work, and you have to be mindful of your life. After all, social entrepreneurship is just that – mindfulness, put together with a life committed to work that creates social good.
And, I’ve learned you can’t create any kind of good without beginning with yourself.
I’ve learned that getting wrapped up in personal conflict, petty conflict – gossip, and other things like it, isn’t innovative. It’s not smart. And, I’ve learned you can’t be innovative or smart if you’re doing those things. If you’re living small, you’re working small. That’s what I’ve seen.
I’ve also seen that learning to let of things – situations that catch you, in particular, is both. It’s innovative. It’s smart. And, it changes both the way you life, and the way you work.
In meditation we call this “dropping a story line.”
Dropping a story line begins with catching yourself – recognizing that we, as people, create stories all day long: about people, about ourselves – about interactions and future plans. Dropping the story means to stop mulling, stop trying to figure it out. It’s the art of bringing oneself back to the present moment, and the task at hand.
I believe its the secret to productivity, innovation and expansion of the heart and mind.
I believe it’s the key to the beauty that consciousness affords us. We can teach ourselves to let things go once we know the difference between what is in front of us, and what we’re imagining might be there.
We can stop getting caught.
On Friday, I sat by a woman with a gold and leather shoulder bag on the train. We exchanged compliments before a student – a girl with a certain oddness about her – sat down.
“I heard this story today,” she opened. “You wouldn’t believe how great it was.”
There was no stopping the outpouring of Snow White, and my train friend didn’t try. She smiled at the girl instead, and moved closer to listen.
Watching them, I felt the colliding of two worlds – stories, and conscious reality.
It lasted for a single stop, when the woman with the bag smiled, and shifted her weight to stand.
“What a wonderful story!” she exclaimed. “But I have to get off here.”
She winked at me, and stepped off the train.
In Your Twenties, Building a Business is Building a Life
January 24, 2013 § 4 Comments
Two hours ago, my friend A called life “really fun.”
Fun, she said, even when its hard – and too fun, she pointed out, to choose not to enjoy yourself when it happens to be.
Here’s what I learned in 2012: entrepreneurship in your twenties has everything to do with building a life. A life is made up of people. The experience you have living it can be good or bad. It depends on who you know.
Here’s how I usually learn: hindsight. Here’s how I learned in 2012: showing up. That’s how I made real friends. Good ones. The make you laugh so hard you snort and then not get embarrassed by your snorting noises kind of friends. The have your back real quick kind of friends.
Here’s what changed: everything.
I learned that while building your first business is difficult, building a life doesn’t have to be. See, a social enterprise, like a life, is built on belief. Belief is kept alive through experience. Experience comes from people.
There’s a perception going around that us entrepreneurs are all grit and determination, living in basements with laptops in dark rooms and skipped paychecks. And, the truth is that nobody can keep that up for too long. We had to figure out how to do it differently. We had to start lives. Now, we’re in the light, laughing with people who know the difference between broke and poor and put cash down for our beers when we’re tight that week. We’re learning from passionate conversations. We’re finding ways to make things beautiful. We’re going all in on our passions. And, dammit, we’re figuring out health insurance and internet bills and signing leases just like the rest of you.
It’s just not all couches and credit cards anymore. Not when we’re building lives.
Here’s what I learned: all this has everything to do with a focused, disciplined life, and nothing to do with skipping out on living. Not skipping out on living has everything to do with relationships: with your mom, your friends, your grandfather…all the people that come together, and make sure your ducks are lining up like you need them to.
That’s how S and I landed a place to launch out in together. I met her at a party, all red lipstick and intense focus, drinking whiskey on the rocks and making a point to the men across from her. Three of them, all leaning in and listening. I wanted to listen too, so I asked her for her number. S is making a life while she works to create sustainable clean water solutions. We had a lot to talk about. Talking turned into eating turned into laughing turned into drinking turned back into laughing and eating again…turned into finding a place to build lives around what we do.
It was only after putting our heads together to find the perfect fit for our not so normal lives that I realized how much we were doing right, creating a physical and metaphysical atmosphere to live out of.
Two months later, we signed a lease on a place with an office, where we’ll hang four foot photographs of her work in Cameroon, and build a long desk to share on the days when we’re home. Our friends will come over this weekend to help us build beds and desks and a sofa. Somewhere along the way, I’ll hang up my Samoan tapa and that silly set of masks I bought the first time I set foot in East Africa.
As we walked through the apartment and designated the “office,” let potential roommates know how much we work from home and planned a rent budget for me quitting my part time job, I realized that I’d bought in. Hook line and sinker, my whole life – I’ve become an entrepreneur.
We finished signing our lease in the afternoon. My friends invited me out that night, to get on train to West Village to laugh and live with them while I take a break from my work – like any girl with a big, happy life – a fun life – would do at the end of a long work day.
This is what buying in and moving to New York for my social entrepreneurship gave me: a life.
On Turning 24, and Experiencing Life Directly and to the Hilt
January 14, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Christine Caldwell writes that happiness lies in the ability to experience life directly and, “to the hilt.”
This experience, she explains, comes from accurately knowing ourselves.
“Knowing who we are gives us all sorts of ideas or stories to tell,” she writes. “I am a woman, a mother a teacher a psychotherapist. While these are all accurate labels, do they really encompass me? Like a compass, do they locate me for myself and others? Ideas may or may not be accurate; they are certainly shaped by what we have been told about ourselves and by our needs for approval and attention. Knowing who we are provides a view that can dictate how we see the world and how we act in it. If gives us a box to live in.”
A friend of mine drove a camper across the country this past summer. She wrote that a group of folks outside Alexandria, Virginia had shown surprise at her choice to go it alone – “don’t you get lonely?”
“What a sad thing it must be not to like being alone with yourself,” she wrote later that day.
I printed it out and put it beside my mirror.
That was back when Ben and I were talking every day. I’d just moved to New York, and he was planning to come meet me after he finished his art history degree in San Francisco. I’d cry sometimes about how often I was alone, and how little I liked it.
He’d tell me it was a season. “By the time I come out, you’ll see it all differently. You’ll be on the other side, man.”
It’s been six months since that season, now – and just long enough to forget how it felt, sometimes, but still be relieved its over. We had brunch in East Village on Saturday. He showed me to the apartment he’s applied for, and grabbed me on the street afterward. “You are doing it man! We are doing it man!”
We parted ways off the L at 14th, and I caught the 6 downtown. I thought about my fighting months in New York – all those times I felt so empty and alone I wanted to run home, just for one desperate weekend to see my family.
I thought about the books I read by the Hudson and the bars I went to by myself, the museum exhibits I found – the walks I took from uptown to Lower East when there was no one to call for a cup of coffee and conversation.
There was no man’s land in there for a while – all this empty feeling in not being sure what to put where inside my identity.
I thought about the shift that started taking place when I stopped resisting – about how I slowly let go of how I used to think I liked to date and liked to live and liked to work and liked to interact – the unnatural feeling process of throwing it all off, getting rid of the ideas I’d formed because I thought they were true. I thought about how surprised I was when I started getting to know myself.
The location of self was key in all of this. I remembered that vividly – asking questions of myself, instead of who I’d made myself out to be based on a bottle collection of experiences and opinions.
Imran Garda writes to his daughter Lamees that, “You will find humility will scurry towards and wash over you when circumstances require it. You don’t need to look for it or project it. Seek it, and the menacing trappings that lie beneath it will be your true motive.”
I found I’d collective negative perceptions like trinkets – like something valuable. The menacing trappings below the search for humility looked like inaccuracy, not properly knowing who I was, just knowing how I tended to act when provoked, or sad – or how I felt when I was first alone in a new city.
I remember asking myself if I had good ideas, if I was creative and smart – if I was “difficult,” like some people had said, or perhaps just passionate. Passionate was something I eased into. Difficult was something I slowly left behind.
When my entrepreneur coach and I met in December, it had been five months since I first began to search for myself. We were drinking coffee and talking over Skype, and she told me that the Mayan calendar, read properly, showed the end of 2012 as a cosmic shift into feminine power.
“Imagine!” she laughed. “All the world exclaiming that disaster is upon us when, in fact, it’s just the global uprising of feminine strength.”
Her laugh and my coffee and the Mayan prediction all felt warm around me, that morning. Like the first time I really knew that I was creative, and a talented entrepreneur. This was a moment of definition of self – one of those building blocks for the box I live in.
Maybe she gave me a placebo, that day – the promise of a year of power serving as a self fulfilling prophecy in the belief that followed. But, on the 6 to Bleeker I realized that all those months spent with the tiniest bit of courage, pushed through to action, were finally showing themselves. All this fearful, apologetic living gone toppling, tumbling down, one day at a time.
I know now that life is built on expectation, instead of dread.
Expectation can be confusing. I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet, but I believe the kind that leads to wholeness has much more to do with belief in the life that grows out of time well spent, instead of the fear that leads to self protection. Opportunity, for me, comes with an opening of self to experiences that lead to expansion. At 23, it meant moving to New York by myself. Then, it meant waking up each morning and doing it, over and over and over again despite fear. It meant emailing shops I did not think would accept my line, pitching to fashion weeks I was surprised accepted, and asking for accounts I didn’t know we’d get so quickly. It meant putting money into a future I didn’t always believe in, and talking with strength about something I felt weak about. That was the hard part – all those months after the big leap across the country. That’s where all the blood and sweat and dying occurred.
I learned, in those months, that there’s the temptation to shrink after moves of big boldness. You finish out the biggest obstacle brimming with bravery and belief and then – what? – all this terror comes up, like left over corruption from the old regime you threw over.
But I know, now, that the insistence to take one more step is all that matters – just enough courage to again and again and again choose to live and speak out of who we are, instead of who we thought we might be. This is the secret to expansion, to entrepreneurship that ends up paying the bills – to life lived directly and to the hilt.
Now, if you’ll excuse me – I have a play to go see by myself, and a 24th birthday to prepare for.
It’s funny – I’m headed out with a group of friends I was surprised accepted an invitation so quickly.
Love, Sacramento and Kicking up Dust in the Empty Spaces
January 3, 2013 § Leave a Comment
J laughs like he’s been taken over. He grabs his stomach and opens his mouth and out comes the joy. I hold it in for a minute, and then I laugh too. I can’t stop. Grabbing my sides, HA! HA! HA! the big sounds come out. My face hurts. My stomach tightens. There’s the rush – all that stuff I was holding in my gut. I catch my breath. He does too.
He slaps my leg.
“Oh, god, that was funny.”
I start to warm up again.
J and I laughed until 2 am, when I curled up on the couch and fell asleep without thinking. I woke up to quiet in his Sacramento first floor apartment the next morning, and watched the light come in through the slanted shades. His boyfriend came out and smiled at me, shirtless and sculpted and beautiful – his boyfriends always are like that.
The boyfriend made coffee, and handed me a mug. We smiled the way people do who have love for a person in common.
Love is easy sometimes – waking up in the quiet by a person who knows what you’re thinking when you don’t say anything at all.
They bought me brunch, this man who has supported me ceaselessly and a partner who wants to talk about Uganda and mobile applications and keeps saying “send me that piece you wrote, yeah?” and “hey, send me that article, don’t forget.” When he was out of earshot J whispered about our congruities – this man and I. There’s Uganda, and there’s this itch to move and this involvement in the start up industry. I smile like a little kid, then, because I know the similarities between myself and his partner mean this man loves me the way I love him.
J brought me home to my parents home after we ate. We drove past the three bedroom off Stevens street where I learned to ride a bike, and turned right on Hwy 49, where you can turn left and find the house where I had my first dog and my first crush and I met a goofy girl in overalls who is still my best friend.
He hugged me tight. “Okay?” he said.
“Okay.”
He drove away, and I got ready to go inside.
Love is a game of tetris sometimes – all this bouncing up against boundaries you put there on purpose so it wouldn’t die out.
Seeing the people you’ve loved the longest kicks up dust in the empty spaces inside you that you haven’t decided about yet. There’s resolve, the new self. There’s the old self you’re trying to hug and kick out the door all at once, and then there’s no-man’s land, all this brain and heart mass that hasn’t been decided on. And, there’s where the melancholy – the lonely – pours in.
Family’s a dust devil – kicking all kinds of things into my undecided spaces.
I can hear my mom talking about me up the stairs. “She flies out Friday. Came in last week. Yep…Yep.” She I do best when we’re playing tetris right, with all these boundaries going up in the right places to keep us from banging into spots that hurt.
Sometimes the want to kick the lonely takes over. Lonely is not having a sure place, and lonely is stilling the noise and lonely is not being sure exactly what to do in a place except for wait. Lonely is a lost paradigm.
Lonely is a sit and a cigarette. Breathe in. Breathe out. Lonely is still learning how to stay with yourself.
I smell cigarettes and oak trees when I close my eyes. There’s a different kind of smoke. It must be a burn day in Northern California.
My grandfather called me an infidel last week. “How can you have Muslim friends if you’re an infidel?” We were drinking wine at the kitchen table I’ve ate at since I was a little girl. I had decided not to fight.
“My friends don’t talk like that, Gramps.”
“They don’t?”
“They don’t.”
I felt heat rising in me. I felt it again on New Years Eve, sitting in front of a fire with a man who educated me on the way men think – that in life, for men like his son, for men that are real men, a woman who says no is the only kind of woman worth having. That any, “broad who spread her legs” isn’t worth much. By spread her legs he said meant consensual sex. He was specific: a woman who says no ten times is always better than a woman who says yes once.
“No,” he shook his head. “Women like that aren’t anything at all.”
I breathed.
He’d told me his ancestors came from Côte d’Ivoire, so I asked him if he’d been to the Ivory Coast. We were laughing after that – him, and a woman he was calling “smart,” after unknowingly calling her nothing.
Not anything at all.
Mom and I played tetris later that night in the kitchen. I played a song on the ihome, and she told me it made her sad. I nodded, “me too.” She asked me about my night. I said, “good.” And, there was silence, right then. I let it be, like I let Gramps be, like I let the man be in front of the fire on New Years. And, I knew that was enough. Just that. The quiet. The knowledge of friction. And, inside it, all the love that keeps a person coming back to a place where they kick up dust with the people they love. Without anybody trying to do it, you know – just like a real desert storm.
I thought of the time she and I danced to Stevie Nicks before I moved to New York City. I remembered that love is like that sometimes – crying and dancing in the kitchen with a person who gets you, even when you don’t say why you’ve got all those tears.
That’s real love for you – desert storms and understanding, all wrapped up together in a sucker punch to the gut.
Love looks a lot like quiet instead of fighting, like an understanding of total misunderstanding, and the choice not to poke the elephant in the corner again. Love looks like not talking politics, and love is knowing nobody taught somebody better when they should have. Love is offering an alternative, without fighting. Sometimes, love is quiet. Sometimes, love is laughing so hard you can’t talk with people you don’t understand at all that year.
Love is the aunts who pinch your ass on their way past you and say “you’re ok?” after you’ve blown up over politics again, just like you knew you shouldn’t.
Love is tetris. Love is a bouncing ball, boundaries and love is smiling when you know nobody’s going to “get it.” Love is melancholy and lonely and a cigarette on the porch when its kicking up dust in the empty spaces.
Love is getting on a place to go back to a life that works better than the one that did here.
Love is the people who beg you to come around, even when they know its going to be difficult.
Love is knowing you’ll be back again – another tetris game, another holiday, another year. And that you’ll come back again after that.
Love is knowing that the dust kicking won’t kill you, after all.
Good Jazz, Shenlok and Music in the Unresolved
December 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
I didn’t hear the long, slow jazz note coming from our right last Wednesday, but E did. He stopped, leaned in and disappeared into a dark doorway, dragging me behind him.
He reached out for my hand and motioned for me to be quiet. In an almost empty room, a jazz trio was playing under a blue and green glow.
I wanted to stand there forever, even though I didn’t like the music. I got this warmed up feeling inside me, and I forgot how hungry I was.
E pulled me back outside into the cold, and in a second we were back dodging pedestrians on Houston and he was asking what I wanted to eat.
We talked about jazz on the way.
“Those are the kind of folks that are killing real jazz,” E said. “Did you hear that fucked up shit?”
What’s good jazz? I don’t know enough to know – except that good jazz rests comfortably on an unresolved note. Bad jazz seems to wrestle with it, like it wants to turn into something different. But good jazz? It just sits there unresolved and it grins at you.
There was a baby girl on the train today. She had Velcro shoes and chubby hands. When the woman with her picked her up, baby girl stretched her fingers and thumb out in an “L” shape towards the center of the train and bounced. The woman started to sing and she sang and she sang to her on the C train from 59th all the way to West 4th where I caught the M home to Myrtle Ave. The baby danced and she yelled and she held her chubby baby hands up to the center of the train and prattled and she stared at me.
There was that warmed up feeling, again. I wanted to stay on the train and watch her dance.
I’m told that you make a hell of a lot of mistakes, as an entrepreneur – that that’s ok. Par for the course. A Wall Street friend I go to for advice sometimes told me the important thing wasn’t that I didn’t make mistakes, but instead that I kept afloat through them – kept my chutzpah. He called it grit. He said if I could stay in the game for long enough and grow my capacity to change, I could make it work.
Willingness to accept change was, he said, the most important thing – to wake up each morning with the mindset – “Fuck it. Today will bring some crazy change and I’m going to embrace and go with it.”
I nodded, and I bit my lip, because I’ve been so dependent on all these things – like immediate results, dependable outcomes – paychecks. Things you don’t get when you start your own thing. And, giving all that up has been like the aftermath of a bad binge. Not the least bit comfortable. Not the least bit natural. Really bad headache. Nausea.
I decided to take all that seriously. “Fix your shit,” that’s what my Wall street friend said. So, I’ve been working on healing from my past perceptions of what my life would look like. And, I’m finding a home in the midst of this Buddhist recovery group on Sunday afternoons – sitting on this big blue cushion in between former heroine addicts and alcoholics and purgers and over eaters, and learning to meditate.
I’m letting go of control, and so are they, so I don’t see much difference in any of us. We’re all a little fucked up and a little too addicted to something and sometimes I don’t like getting out of bed any more than they do. So, while everyone’s spilling out their fantasies about stuffing their mouth so full they barf and how they got hot sweats during a date that weekend and what kind of anti anxiety pills they just switched to, I sit and I cry in the middle of all the recovery and I laugh with them until my sides hurt – and I don’t feel so alone in this crazy city I’ve adopted.
My group leader likes to draw distinctions. There’s power in naming things, she says. Sad and depressed aren’t the same thing. But they both can be healed by staying grounded in the moment. She talks about change – that we can’t control when things work, or how they work, but we sure can control the way we respond to them, and the way we respond to our uncomfortable feelings about them.
We read this bit on the definition of dysfunctional – that a person is never just one thing. A label – like dysfunctional, like depressed, like co-dependent, rests not only on the naming of things but on ensuring that they don’t take up more space than they ought to.
So, you may often find yourself depressed, but that doesn’t mean you’re depressed every moment. Perhaps you could even be defined as “depressed” this afternoon, but tonight you’re gleeful, or angry, or loud or drunk or expectant. And, that’s valid. That’s who you are, the same as sad or depressed or addicted or (fill in your blank here).
Things crashed last month, but my solution was successful Tuesday. We made a mistake on Wednesday morning, but on Wednesday afternoon I was brilliant. And, all of that matters equally. All of that defines me.
It’s the prattling of babies and the quick laughter of people I didn’t expect that makes my life light up, in the midst of learning to be comfortable with unexpected change. Like the videos my nine year old cousin, Sam, sends me from an old generation iPad my aunt lets him use. Ill be out walking in Brooklyn and suddenly there’s a blonde boy in my inbox, making silly faces and telling me to have a good night. And I want to kiss my aunt for kicking him that little piece of technology because I couldn’t be connected this closely to Sam any other way.
I sent him a video from the 81st street Central Park West train station tonight. Every few weeks this beautiful black man pops up by the South entrance and he sings out “Because He Lives” in a voice so rich and deep and full that I take my headphones out and I soak up every word – as if Jesus himself were on 81st street, smiling and saying that he’ll help me face tomorrow.
The 81st street singer makes me feel the same way I do when the videos from Sam come through on my iPhone. Full. Slowed. Grounded. So I pulled my phone out and I took a video for Sam, and kept it recording until the train showed up, because even if he doesn’t appreciate my train serenade, I know he’ll like watching the B roll through like that.
I’ve begun to surround myself with experiences like this – the ones that give me that full, slow, grounded feeling. I’m actively cultivating it. I find it in children, and I find it when I decide to look out, as my J train runs over the Williamsburg bridge. I get it around people who believe in goodness and in light, in having deep friendships, telling the truth and paying attention to the people around them when they talk. I get it when I really take the time to read. I get it with every small success in Uganda, and when I insist that I won’t let struggle take over…and I breathe, instead, and open the curtains by my desk and make a fresh French press full of coffee.
I get it when I recognize that I’d like to tell the universe to fuck herself, let her know that love is supposed to look certain ways and come out like this or that, and that, as a woman, what I need is XY and Z from my job or my life or my family – but I don’t. I stop wanting to, because I’m laughing so hard I hurt with this kid on the crosstown, or feeling the slow buzz of a dark Belgian ale out with a new friend of mine, and I know, instead, that have absolutely everything I need.
My friends on the blue cushions are teaching me that life comes in insistence that whatever is in front of you matters more immensely than anything else. Shenlok - it doesn’t matter so much that you’ve got everything resolved, but that you’re able to hold your seat comfortably while it’s not.
That’s when your make your own kind of music.
Everything after that is just part of the song.
Death, Cultural Customs and the Interaction between a Mourning Period and Social Entrepreneurship
December 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
In 1997, a Makerere University study reported that for a widow to be socially integrated into local support systems, she needs four factors in her favor. The first factor is the composition and culture of her society. Second is her community, and how it can help her overcome her sadness. Third the widow’s recovery from her problems depends on the support she gets from the family of her late husband. Fourth is a favorable neighborhood and working environment.
I was in Uganda three days after the World Cup bombings. An explosive ripped through a city restaurant and sports club in Kampala. 74 people were dead. Yoweri Museveni declared a one week mourning period.
There are ways to be born, there are ways to celebrate love between two people, and there are ways to die. Our cultures and our families collectively dictate the way we do these things, and I believe we can learn more than we often realize from the way someone else does any one of them.
I remember sitting on a stoop in a compound, listening to seven women talk about their favorable conditions after their husband died. He left a long, U shaped building, with single apartments each owned by a single wife.
“Thank God he provided for us,” one told me. “He was a good man.”
I never thought more about the legacy a person leaves behind than I did in Uganda, that year. It showed itself in the material provision that individuals left behind, in the way communities mourned and in the manner in which the deceased’s family treated any relatives joined to them through marriage. We have elements of this in my culture too. But the societal expectation behind customs of mourning in Uganda seemed to put color and honor to death.
Here, you know, we “need to start moving again.” We know that, “life goes on.” The emotional expectation is that grieving will change the way we perceive our lives, but we laud pushing through as normally as possible. Society does not provide a widow or grieving mother protection from work, from the ripping feeling of time moving forward, from responsibilities. But, in Uganda, they demand that it all come to a grinding halt.
Ugandan surgeon and politician Speciosa Kazibwe wrote in 2008 that, “Most of us spend [more of] our time doing burials than any other thing, especially because of HIV/AIDS and malaria which is very prevalent in Uganda.”
Doing business in a culture takes customs from the classroom to life, so to speak. And, I believe that one of the benefits of “trade versus aid” is that business forces you to engage customs, while aid often provides an excuse for dismissing them as unimportant.
Mourning periods provided scattered timetables in my life this winter, pouring in and taking over weeks at a time. It’s been four this season: three artisans and our lead artisan’s son, three weeks ago.
“This will change things, this week,” my manager’s voice was apologetic, while we discussed our lead artisan. “We can’t reach her during mourning.”
How many days? I ask.
Five.
“You didn’t expect that, working in Africa?” someone said to me recently. Like I should have expected death to come climbing in and hunker down on my desk while I run my business.
No. I didn’t. With ARVs and money in my partner’s pockets for treatment, I thought we’d avoid so many deaths. Somehow I ended up blaming myself – like I should have started my business sooner, grown it faster – done something. As if my business could act as some kind of Messiah, saving a community through the sales of accessories. And, that’s never what this was about. This was about a mutual celebration of the beauty of a culture’s craftsmanship, and sustainable development through it.
“This isn’t just fucking normal just because its East Africa,” I threw out. “It’s not normal. Death never becomes normal.”
And, so, I came to an impasse. Either I pushed to have women work through mourning periods, or I created a plan around them. And I came to the conclusion that traditional practices are higher dictators than the business practices a social entrepreneur like myself is attempting to implement – its not my job to change that.
There are local minds working on issues like these already – minds that understand their importance, and what their erosion might give or take to a culture and its economy. In 2003, BBC Africa discussed the pros and cons of ending costly funerals. Ms Kazibwe suggested, in her piece, that funeral practices are moved to Saturdays, and that each constituency within Uganda should have a mortuary with a fridge that could preserve corpses. Burials take up lots of time as well as productive vehicles, she noted.
“The idea sounds good if more time is to be saved for the sake of work. However, given the strong cultural rituals attached to death and burial of a relative, it is practically impossible to keep the body,” George, a gentleman from Musaka, argued in the comments below Kazibwe’s piece. “I know, for example, from the traditions of Buganda that it is unacceptable in society to go to work when someone has passed away in the same village until the body is buried. It is a strong belief that has existed for ages. So to change the status quo requires a lot of effort. Remember that traditional practices are not easily eroded in society!”
I think its rude to act like death is more acceptable at a certain latitude and longitude, bit of my friend’s head for insinuating it – and yet I caught myself doing the same thing – wondering why our lead artisan wasn’t on her game as usual, and then remembering her son just died. As if five days, in any case, could possibly be enough to be back upright.
I read and I struggled and I oscillated on these issues. And I landed on the truth that they have nothing to do with me. I can debate the economic effects, but I am not in the midst of the affected economy. I can wonder about funeral rituals, but I will never bury a family member of mine in a similar way. And, so, I’m learning that what matters is my cultural respect – my smart movement around these things, out of an acknowledgement that I have chosen to run a business in a society unlike my own.
We decided that, for us, its important to allow customs room to breathe, until they prove harmful. And, what I mean by that is causing immediate physical harm. Like the time I helped name my cook’s baby, and noticed a thin, white film of amniotic fluid that was never washed off his body. My village partner, Agnes, explained to me later that this was because of his mother’s family, and their superstition surrounding a newborn child being touched by water. That week, a friend of mine bought the family a baby kit as a gift, and Agnes took it to them and explained the health concerns surrounding following the custom.
I was pleased to find out how successful she’d been in explaining the risks, and how receptive my cook’s girlfriend had been in accepting a new way of doing things – one that was best for her child. But this line is a tight rope – you get that? It’s not my place to question traditions surrounding death, and its not my place to challenge the Shaman or to debate the way that a bride price might affect a family’s well being. And, it was Agnes’ place – a woman in her own community – to explain to her someone how she might be harming her kid. This is why I partner equally with locals. This is why I am not the one always on the ground.
It’s my place to give due honor to – show respect within – a culture that has different ways of giving birth and celebrating love and giving life over to death – and to allow that culture room to figure out these things on its own.
And, perhaps these rituals, in themselves, are teaching me something. These ways of being run like deep rivers beneath the women who work with me, carrying them along. I picture the erosion, like the caving in of deep banks of Ugandan red dirt, taking a culture with them. And I want to tread ever so lightly when it comes to inadvertently stealing tradition from a place – from a life running beneath a people who teach me how to stop, pay attention and appreciate all the new things I never knew about the world outside my own culture’s way of being.
And, so, we factored an extra week into our lead time, after this season – allowing for death, should it creep up, steal from my partners and sending them from their work for a week to honor the way that their traditions ask them to celebrate and honor the passing of life.
(Photo: Edward Echwalu for Nakate Project).
Thoughts from a Buddhist Shrine: The Necessity of the Present Task
December 5, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I spent two hours at a Buddhist shrine in Chelsea this weekend, sitting and feeling my legs ache while I tried to find my center.
“You’re going to feel yourself pulled off course,” my instructor said. “That’s ok. Acknowledge it – ‘thought’ – and pull yourself back to the breath.”
There’s nothing that feels immediately natural about meditation. Here you are on a cushion in a room full of other people with your eyes wide open, trying not to get too caught up staring at one single spot while you focus on your breathing.
I’ve rarely spent time in total stillness by the time the gong rings to end the session. But when I’m tempted to get mad at myself for planning my week out instead of finding my center, I remember that I show up at this studio in Chelsea because meditation isn’t about perfection but, rather, about learning to hold your seat – to stay in the moment without changing its discomfort and imperfection.
It’s just this kind of thinking – “gentle thinking” – that brings me back to recognize that this exact moment, with the room full of people and the ache in my knees – is important. And, therein lies the secret to meditation.
The concepts I learn through this practice have proved to be some of the most helpful tools I’ve discovered in my journey as a young female business owner in New York.
The process of building a business without financial backing takes 4-5 years, with at least your first two typically spent in the red. Proof of concept can often take a year in itself, and the mistakes you’ll make after that will take both your money and your time.
What all of that adds up to is a whole lot of imperfect discomfort that I’ve learned you can’t build anything worth holding onto without. No matter what way you slice it, a business is built on thousands of individual moments that need your attention before you can move forward. And, sometimes, it feels like its going to be forever before someone rings the gong and welcomes you into the next phase.
When my heart is tired and my brain hurts and my emotions are all pushing me to give it up, the principles of meditation are teaching me to stay with the right now. Not when I’m making x amount of money, or manage to take on x amount of new accounts. Right now. This moment, with the recent mistakes and the present frustrations.
I’m learning to “hold my seat” – to engage fully with this exact stage of my business, just like each moment on the cushion.
Here are a few reasons why that is so important:
The future builds off this moment.
I’m often tempted to run ahead to the next thing – to do what’s more exciting or let my thoughts wander out to six months from now, but the truth is that each individual phase of building is vitally important to the next. If I hadn’t spent a year providing my concept, or several months on strategic planning, or made mistakes that showed me what direction not to continue in, our business never would have moved forward to the next phase.
This moment is teaching me something I need to know.
In hindsight, some of the most seemingly “wasteful” moments of my business have taught me absolutely vital skills. I saw this last year, after helping my former guide through a medical emergency in Uganda. I was glad to help – but I struggled, over those weeks. I was there to do business and ended up spending hours in medical clinics and hospitals, arguing with drivers and handling payments.
While all that time felt genuinely wasted due to a corrupt health-care system, those weeks taught me cultural insights that now prove useful to me every day.
This moment deserves my attention.
In meditation you learn that things you typically ignore, like your breath and the feeling of your stomach filling with air, are actually tools. While seeming insignificant, they can actually be the key to handling your life’s largest stress areas well. And, I’ve found that seemingly mundane or unexciting tasks I’d like to ignore make up the foundation of my business – things like market research, accounting, inventory are each important in their own right, and need to be done well in order for the business as a whole entity to flow smoothly.
This moment will give me strength for the next one.
I was once told that building a business like running a marathon. This means that endurance is required. And, the only way that you can learn to get comfortable with endurance is by starting with where you’re at. Slowing down and breathing through one moment is what gets me through the next.
So - Breathe. Stop. Stay.
Give this imperfect, messy moment your very best.
(A version of this post can be found over in my weekly column in the London based women’s lifestyle magazine Your Coffee Break).
