Humainologie creative dialogue team practice this Wednesday October 14
- Arthur Clark
- Oct 12, 2020
- 7 min read
Here is excellent advice for anyone who aims to increase their power of creativity: Always have several creative projects on the go simultaneously. The idea is developed in this presentation:
The Zoom link for our team practice, which starts at 6:30 PM this Wednesday October 14, is here
Meeting ID: 894 2935 3349
Passcode: 081210
Our creative dialogue team practice session this time will include something special, a 20-minute presentation of Greg’s, One Vision & Five Transitions for a Better World. My synopsis of the wonderful book by Michelle Obama is appended below. And here once again are two exercises for you. Practice, practice, practice!
1. The first exercise assumes you already have an idea for something you would like to actualize in the year ahead. Perhaps it’s been a dream of yours for a long time, perhaps you have already begun working on it. By structuring this goal or dream of yours into a quest, with a timeline and a way to measure your progress, you will empower your creativity and make your dream achievable. You might also keep a journal to record your progress. That journal might become a treasure for your grandchildren. Between now and next Wednesday October 14, structure your vision as a quest, and share it with us at team practice.
2. The second exercise is to come up with an idea for a quest we could do together as a Calgary dialogue group over the year ahead.
Just for fun,
Arthur
Book: Becoming (Michelle Obama, 2018)
“I used to tell people that when I grew up, I was going to be a pediatrician. Why? Because I loved being around little kids and I quickly learned that it was a pleasing answer for adults to hear. Oh, a doctor! What a good choice! …Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.” We are always a work in progress, always becoming something other than what we used to be.
Michelle Robinson Obama has been a lawyer, “a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college;” “a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief.” She has been the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) and, for me at least, the author of a profoundly wise autobiography written in brilliant prose, one of the most moving books I have ever read. The book has four sections: “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us,” “Becoming More,” and an Epilogue.
Chicago was her home, and her family was a blessing. Both parents were devoted to their children’s success. Her older brother Craig became an outstanding basketball player in Chicago, later at Princeton. Her father developed multiple sclerosis yet never missed a day of work in more than twenty years of tending boilers at a water filtration plant for the city of Chicago, ever mindful of the income to provide for their children’s education and other needs. Of her mother, she writes: “My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate – a kind of unflappable Zen neutrality.” Their parents bought them a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, encouraged them to read it for answering many questions about the world; and insisted they use proper diction. In countless ways, they nudged Craig and Michelle along a path of high standards and responsible self-esteem.
They did not disappoint their parents. Michelle Robinson attended Princeton, then Harvard law school, then joined a law firm in Chicago. There she met Barack Obama. Though three years older than she, he was still a student at Harvard law school when he became an intern at the Chicago law firm. Michelle became his mentor. It was the threshold of their relationship, described in section two of the book, “Becoming Us.” Another threshold was not far away.
Her father was near the end of his life. On one occasion, he had become so weak that one day he had to stop and rest before continuing to his car for the drive to work. At last he was taken to the hospital as an emergency and Michelle found him, on the night before his death, so weak he could scarcely communicate. “Losing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and ponder how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he died. …The lesson there was simple: Life is short and not to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.”
After evaluating more than one opportunity open to her, she was persuaded to join the staff of Mayor Daly’s office in Chicago. She had been interviewed for the position by Valerie Jarrett, who had come to work at the mayor’s office under Harold Washington. He had been elected mayor in 1983, and as the first African American mayor of Chicago, he had inspired many gifted black Americans, including Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett. When Washington died suddenly of a heart attack, the city voted for Richard M. Daley (the son of a previous mayor, Richard J. Daley) and white cronyism returned to the mayor’s office in Chicago. Nonetheless, Valerie Jarrett had decided to stay with the mayor’s office and was on Mayor Daley’s staff when she interviewed Michelle. As Michelle was making this momentous decision for her future, she asked Valerie Jarrett to have dinner with herself and her fiancé Barack Obama. Valerie became part of their lives. “Without our ever discussing it, it seemed almost as if the three of us had somehow agreed to carry one another a good long way.”
The engagement itself had been contentious, with Barack inclined away from convention and Michelle insisting on marriage. He could live in the ocean, Michelle explains, while she needed a boat. Michelle needed order and predictability; Barack loved spontaneity and the unpredictable. At a restaurant dinner one evening, each argued their case for and against the formality of marriage, until the dessert tray arrived, the silver lid was lifted, and there was the diamond ring that Barack had arranged for dessert. Michelle was completely surprised. Barack smiled and said, “Well, that should shut you up!” Barack and Michelle were married in October 1992, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Barack and Michelle both wanted children, but it was only with time and effort that Michelle was able to become pregnant. Their first daughter, Malia, was born on July 4, 1998. Their second daughter, Sasha, was born on June 10, 2001. Now the responsibility of being a mother was added to Michelle’s already packed schedule, and as if this weren’t enough, Barack decided to run for the United States Senate. She conveys the rising tension in the marriage: “At home, our frustrations began to rear up often and intensely. Barack and I loved each other deeply, but it was as if at the center of our relationship there were suddenly a knot we couldn’t loosen.” They sought marriage counseling, which helped both of them. Michelle writes, “I now tried out a new hypothesis; It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be.”
She had worked with Public Allies, a national organization dedicated to helping young adults fulfill their potential, whether they had a college degree or not. Later, she accepted a similarly rewarding position at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she eventually led a team of 22 people, initiating programs to connect hospital staff and trustees with the community as mentors; to bring Chicago youngsters to job-shadow staff at the hospital; to increase the number of city residents volunteering at the hospital, to encourage students to consider medicine as a career; and to hire and train local people as patient advocates working in the emergency room.
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention held in Boston, Barack had been asked to give the keynote address, and “by the time he finished, ,...the crowd was on its feet and roaring, the applause booming in the rafters.” Not long afterward he was elected to the US Senate, “winning 70 percent of the vote statewide, the largest margin in Illinois history and the biggest landslide of any Senate race in the country that year.” In 2008, he was elected President of the United States. They had become man and wife, then parents, and now they became POTUS and FLOTUS.
Again, she found her calling, launching a program to end the epidemic of childhood obesity within one generation. Children were often invited to the White House, where she planted a vegetable garden. The support grew exponentially, and she changed history on that one. She travelled widely, to meet people from many countries, including schoolchildren, Queen Elizabeth, Desmond Tutu (who engaged her in a push-up contest), and the elderly Nelson Mandela. High expectations always, and the eyes of predators looking for any little mistake. In 2011 Donald Trump began magnifying the rumors that Barack had not been born in Hawaii and was not eligible for the office of president of the United States. Trump was inciting insanity. “I tried not to worry, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”
Near the end of the book, she writes, “I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”
Donald Trump notwithstanding, Michelle Obama tends to forgive, even as she aims to inspire. For me personally, this book has taken down a wall. As I worked on this synopsis, I felt again how far short of the actual book my synopsis must always fall. Every page of Becoming is a treasure, and I feel grateful to Michelle Obama for having written it. Please read this book.
Comments