The Bridge #103
in which we clarify again the message
Hello
& Welcome ! The Bridge is a newsletter connecting the professional and the personal creatively across cultures and a diversity of topics, until we are not only full of ideas but also ready to take action. Thanks for joining in the conversation.
I got lost the other day while biking in the city, and fortunately (thanks to mapping technologies) found my way back again rather easily. The moment of being lost though allowed me to discover this mural above, and to take pause. “Be proud of who you are, every day, all day.” What a nice reminder!
What if billboards, rather than trying to persuade us to buy things we don’t in fact need, were instead reminding us of important truths like this one: “Be proud of who you are” ? What might happen then, if we were reminded of our intrinsic value on such a regular basis we began to believe it, and we believed the right of others to feel the same as well? Would it change things?
Something Fun
This song is the opener for the TV show Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a show that fans of Scott Pilgrim vs The World will appreciate. I’m not sure everyone will love it. But maybe start with Scott Pilgrim vs The World (a film from ~15 years ago) or with the manga that it’s based on (called simply Scott Pilgrim).
Even without knowing the story, you can listen to this high energy Japanese-language song that expresses poetically and visually the spirit of the show.
The video game refences and the silliness and the nerdy/geeky shyness all help me feel connected to my own childhood. The song “bloom” by Necry Talkie is for me also an exercise in just embracing the unknown because it’s coming from a culture I did not grow up with, and the culture I grew up in was not one that I felt I could relate to — therefore, a theme of my life is embracing the unknown.
In a garage that somehow smells like a cabinet /
Dreaming of nothing but crazy dreams /
I want to sleep a little longer /
On the side of the road where the gravel was dry /
Rubbish can be seen rolling a couple of times /
that now looked beautiful to me /
that’s all. I’m talking rubbish.
Something to Consider
There is a podcast I like that is “for kids” or “for families with young kids” — but I’m thinking maybe it’s for everyone. Because we need to hear more regularly the “basic” truths of joy and kindness and care, to balance out with the complexity of our global economic situation. It isn’t a good or healthy thing if we have been psychologically tricked into believing that “the world is too complex” and therefore cold-hearted calculations are the only way. It is not OK that we can so easily become resigned to “the way things are” if the way things are… are in fact doomsday-ish and depressing.
So I turn to “children’s stories” for inspiration on a regular basis, and this podcast Circle Round has a wonderful way of bringing to life folktales from around the world that remind us of important truths about kindness and care and so on.
Most recently it was a Vietnamese folktale about two close friends, Strong Mind and Kind Heart:
As young people, Kind Heart and Strong Mind made a pact together. Kind Heart would work really hard and earn enough money to send Strong Mind to school (higher education). Once Strong Mind graduated and met some success, Strong Mind would then use his power of positioning to help his friend Kind Heart to realize his dreams. Unfortunately, by the time Strong Mind graduated and had become advisor to the king, he had also willfully chosen to forget Kind Heart. When he learns of his friend’s betrayal, Kind Heart is devastated. A fairy then shows up and tells Kind Heart that they (the fairies) have been following his story. They will help set things right. By a trick of magic (thanks to the help of the fairies), Kind Heart switches places with Strong Mind, and "all is made right” in the end.
I told this story to a friend (and reader of The Bridge), and she said that she wasn’t so sure we can simplify things in this way today. “I'm more and more convinced,” she said, “that in our hyper-liberal and individualist society, having a kind heart requires a strong mind.” Couldn’t agree more!
In fact, the fairy who helps Kind Heart is very cunning indeed. If the story were something like The Sting or Ocean’s Eleven, then our story’s fairy would be the heist’s mastermind. We might imagine sleek disguises, cool demeanors, surprising twists, and an exploration of what it means to be a trustworthy friend in a complicated world.
For the full story, listen to Strong Mind & Kind Heart (a story from Circle Round)
Something to Read
In the spirit of ongoing experimentation, I have been letting The Bridge get a little bit longer. I am finding that the things I want to say are needing more elaboration, and I’m betting that if you readers are wishing The Bridge be shorter… you’ll tell me, before unsubscribing. If you feel that The Bridge is improving, please do share with friends. I want to widen the circle and uplevel the conversation.
It’s also the case that I’m personally working to up-level my skills as a fundraiser.
My beliefs around fundraising are the following: (1) Our society is not generally moving money in the most healthy of ways, (2) and we have begun to believe that cold calculations of risk avoidance and un-capped wealth accumulation are the only smart ways to “do business.” (3) Socially impactful organizations are often led by kind, generous, thoughtful people who have dared take action to create a way to serve more people. (They created a social impact organization — a non-profit, a small business or a hybrid between the two.) Their organizations continue to exist because they are recognized by some intake of money (revenue of some kind). (4) Oftentimes though, these leaders and organizations are not recognized enough for the value that they bring. (5) When we think about helping young people, for instance, we struggle to put a price tag on what it “costs” to take care of their social-emotional wellbeing. It often costs more than we expect to empower these young people, and the time and energy and effort required from a team to make it happen is often more than we’d initially calculate. This failure of imagination results in an under-resourcing of social impact leaders. (6) Self-care is so important. It’s also important that we have enough money to do what we’ve planned to do. Burnout is not a personal failure. It’s a collective one.
For the social impact organizations I support, I have seen time and again a lack of financing can increase stress and decrease capacity to serve the communities they are serving. (& oftentimes they are serving communities of young people, who have not yet built successful careers and therefore cannot give back financially until much much later on.)
If the leaders who have been courageous enough to create organizations that support young people are themselves under-resourced, then there is a problem with how we are usually making decisions to use money.
We all agree that young people should be taught math and reading, and we probably all believe that it would be good if young people grow up to be kind and helpful and skilled and independent. But it seems we aren’t (as a society) investing enough time and attention and money to support that reality for most young people. We need to not only understand the problem better but also feel energized enough to do something about it.
To that end, I’d like to make some suggestions for organizations we could support — and will be featuring organizations in future issues of The Bridge. My idea in suggesting is to open up a richer conversation. You the readers are under no obligations to fund organizations that I have come to believe in, but I do hope that you will find it interesting WHY I support these organizations. & in turn, we’ll hopefully learn something together about how to better resource the organizations and the movement more broadly, the goal being to fully resource the empowerment of young people as a society (even if it ends up being a very local one).
By continuing this exploration, we will I hope inspire each other to take new actions.
Something to Practice
Deep breath.
& say it with me,
“We’re going to be OK.
We are who we are, and we are enough.”
We are enough :)
Embracing it all,
with a kind heart and a strong mind.
Talk soon,
JPC