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Dec 31, 2020

#157




With 2020 drawing to a close and the promise of 2021 beckoning, I am choosing to share a variety of links which have - over this last year of uncertainty - proved to be educational, inspirational and uplifting for various reasons.


ARTICLES: Scientific American’s article Unknown Unknowns: The Problem of Hypocognition (August 2018) is intriguing and well worth reading to learn about the concept of hypocognition; The Language of Teaching (December 2020) and Obliquity (October 2020) both written by Nick Alchin from UWCSEA offer - like his other weekly posts on http://nickalchinuwcsea.blogspot.com/ - insightful perspectives; Caroline Randall Williams’ June 2020 powerful narrative in The New York Times, You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument, starts with the statement, “I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.”


BOOKS: Kim Scott’s Radical Candor read as part of Better Leaders Better Schools Mastermind gives food for thought drawing on the importance of both caring personally and challenging directly so as to bring radical candour to our interactions and leadership rather than operating in the quadrants of ruinous empathy, manipulative insincerity or obnoxious aggression; Elif Shafak’s How To Stay Sane In An Age of Division; Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. Observations and Provocations includes short essays and brief observations based on many years of living in Japan.


FILMS: Bosta (بوسطة‎), submitted as Lebanon’s official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 79th Academy Awards (Oscars) in 2007.


LIFELONG LEARNING: Futurelearn has some wonderful courses on offer including languages, cultures, mindfulness and more. This year, I enjoyed the University of Groningen’s Multilingual Learners: Tackling Challenges and Creating Opportunities course, and look forward to taking (once the new enrollment is open) to The University of Newcastle’s (Australia) Anthropology: Understanding Societies and Cultures and The University of Exeter’s Empire: the Controversies of British Imperialism.


MINDFULNESS AND MANTRAS: For many months, I have started each day with Kristine Carlson’s Golden pause mantra: “Together, we breathe in sunlight and love; letting go of fear and replacing it with love. We breathe in gratitude, and we let go of tension. We release anxiety and fill our hearts with joy.” This proves to be very grounding; I appreciate inspirational emails entitled Light's Daily Dose as well as Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic podcast.




QUOTES: Favourite quote site: https://www.passiton.com/ to which you can subscribe to receive a quote each day.


TED Talks: Poet Ali’s July 2019 The Language of Being Human which embraces - language/culture and compassion and empathy; Pico Iyer’s August 2014 The Art of Stillness in which he reflects on travel and the joys of being; Elif Shafak’s November 2020 If trees could speak; Derek Sivers’ 2009 Weird, or just different? which contrasts some cultural differences; Ibram X. Kendi’s May 2020 Ted Talk, The difference between being "not racist" and antiracist in which he reiterates his oft quoted, “And so really the heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial, and the sound of that heartbeat has always been, "I'm not racist."”


VIDEOS: I love this video of Japanese fire fighters as it illustrates the power of precision and team work; the Bouygues Christmas Advert 2019 which highlights tradition and connection; Erin Robinson’s July 2020 PTC Pearl of Wisdom Know Yourself as an Interculturally Responsive Leader in which she referenced the importance to ask ourselves how our culture, bias, privilege, and experience influence and impact our leadership and communication on a day to day basis; John Amaechi’s What is white privilege? (BBC, August 2020) or What is white privilege? (via Twitter if you are unable to access the BBC video from your current location for rights reasons, August 2020) - In this 150 second video for CBBC (Children’s BBC channel), he shared his understanding of the term privilege. The paragraph that most resonates is, “Privilege is a hard concept for people to understand, because normally when we talk of privilege we imagine immediate unearned riches and tangible benefits for anyone who has it. But white privilege and indeed all privilege is actually more about the absence of inconvenience, the absence of an impediment or challenge, and as such when you have it, you really don't notice it, but when it's absent, it affects everything you do.” More about this video and his rationale and motivation to speak out about white privilege may be found in the Kehinde Andrew’s article in The Guardian, John Amaechi: how the first NBA player to come out is now teaching us all about white privilege (September 2020)



As we usher in 2021, these two quotes seem particularly apt:



“And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that never were.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke


“What the new year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the new year.”

~ Vern McLellan



Stay safe, stay well and all the best for 2021! Last of all, enjoy these words from Rachel Marie Martin's Lessons from 2020.


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