My cousin is composing a beautiful list on Twitter of the 100 reasons why she is Proudly South African. I am proudly South African. It struck me though that most of the things on the list are things that anyone who appreciates beauty in nature (Table Mountain), animals (The Great White Shark), wonderful music (Miriam Makeba), or extending the lives of people they love (Christiaan Barnard) etc. etc. would be 'proud' of the list too. The reason these lists unite is because people are keen to say - yup, we (a broader definition of I) did that. I don't think the main reason is we did that and you didn't. Sometimes we are scared off by things we will be free to discard/don't understand, and that prevents us from accessing the good bits. Safety in numbers/fear stops us from stretching. Our best friends mostly speak the same language as us, enjoy what we already enjoy, think similarly to us. More so as we get older. Sometimes someone is profoundly and clearly wrong about something. So wrong that they blow up buildings, themselves, or others. Sometimes someone is more subtly wrong/different about something (Capitalist v Socialist, Religious v Atheist, Value investor v Momentum investor v Passive investor). Sometimes someone is just different (Chocolate v Vanilla, Sharks v Crusaders, Liverpool v Chelsea). For the stuff that matters, sometimes we just talk to the Rider when it is the Elephant that is in charge. You can't rationally explain/debate the points. You have to find the good bits. The why someone does something may not be a reason but feeling. If we can extract that thing and see if we can replicate it, then we can discard the bad bits. If there are then just chocolate-vanilla differences, we are on to something.
One step I think would be awesome is if we identified the best public holidays from each country. We saw which ones essentially celebrated the same things and combined them to narrow the list, and annually or over a 4 year period (if there are too many) we encouraged the global celebration of really cool reasons to be alive together. I think Diwali, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Shabbat dinner (ok - not a holiday, but awesome), Ramadan/Lent/Empathy Month would be great. What are some of your favourite holidays?
No comments:
Post a Comment