It’s great to be back in the Bay Area after five weeks of working in Australia, Malaysia and London.
While I was away, Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, delivered the commencement address at Smith College and, in a most remarkable way, she dared the graduates of the all-female college to reconsider how they define success. Success has largely been determined by money and power, Huffington argued, and so we need a third metric. Arianna Huffington proposed that this metric be one based on “well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back,” she said. In her speech, Arianna Huffington suggested to graduates that they not settle just for breaking through glass ceilings and instead change the system by “going to the root of what’s wrong.”
“Don’t buy society’s definition of success,” she said. “Because it’s not working for anyone. It’s not working for women, it’s not working for men, it’s not working for polar bears, it’s not working for the cicadas that are apparently about to emerge and swarm us. It’s only truly working for those who make pharmaceuticals for stress, diabetes, heart disease, sleeplessness and high blood pressure.”
She goes on to say:
“I’m convinced about two fundamental truths about human beings.” “The first truth is that we all have within us a centered place of wisdom, harmony, and strength. This is a truth that all the world’s religions — whether Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism — and many of its philosophies, hold true in one form or another. . . . The second truth is that we’re all going to veer away from that place again and again and again. That’s the nature of life. In fact, we may be off-course more often than we are on-course. . . . When we’re in that centered place of wisdom, harmony and strength, life is transformed from struggle to grace and we are suddenly filled with trust — no matter the obstacles, challenges and disappointments. Because there is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, not as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if, as the poet Rumi put it, “Everything is rigged in our favor.”
We obviously needed to be open, and we need to allow ourselves to sometimes be broken open as that is often where wisdom, strength and learning glimmer through. And sometimes we need to be prepared to do a U-turn on our established ideas and viewpoints.
I was thinking about Huffington’s expressed focus on wonder while in a taxi where the young male driver was telling me about his passion work as a musician and that he’d recently formed a band with a group of other musicians and they were planning to record soon. “Is there an arts council in the US like there is with the Australia Council for the Arts in Australia? ” I asked. “No, and in fact in the US there’s so little attention given to the arts and to music in schools that it diminishes the creative outlets that students have available in the classroom,” he said. “I’m sure that this lack of creative connection in the classroom must contribute to the levels of violence in US society and yet there’s been no formal correlation about the impact of this form of poverty.” As he was talking I was thinking about the brilliant work that my friends, Andrea Lemon and Andrea Rieniets were doing in schools in Australia through their Kids Thrive program.
Andrea and Andrea created Kids Thrive in order to meld an approach that blended arts and community development in order to fostering positive social outcomes for children and their communities. They saw the chance to connect artists with specialists in children’s education, health, welfare and social justice, to create a range of arts-based programs to benefit children, especially those who might be at risk. They have also worked closely with school teachers, launching the pilot program last year in a form where the team delivers weekly one-hour sessions to build resilience, social skills, empathy and emotional regulation in students aged six to eight.
Speaking about their work in The Age, Andrea Rieniets said
“It’s about boosting confidence and positive risk-taking. They’re being asked to try things they have never tried before, in a safe way.” “This might include learning how to make eye contact and then we do rhythm, movement and mindfulness,” she says. “We call that ‘calming the thoughts and feelings’. That really heightens their awareness about self-regulation: I have thoughts and I have feelings and I can guide them.”
This approach to child led change is allowing children to take their newly found confidence and skills beyond the classroom to their homes and communities.
Kids Thrive has also developed important creative and kinetic approaches to teaching children about leadership and how to be philanthropists, and allowing them to practice these skills in safe and supportive environments.
Education plays itself out in many forms and the powerful testimonies I’ve read recently in two books affirm the potency of human rights education.
In Mary Robinson’s autobiography, Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice
Commenting on the case, Mary Robinson said ‘Her situation was similar to that of thousands of women in Ireland who had found themselves trapped in an irretrievably broken marriage, with no money to obtain the legal advice and representation required to regularize (and in some instances, escape) their circumstances.’
Mary Robinson went on to say, ‘What was different about Josie Airey was that she had a strong sense of her right to justice, and the courage and determination to pursue that right in every way she could. Unlike so many other dependent wives in Ireland in similar circumstances, she was not prepared to resign herself passively to the unhappy position in which she found herself.
In June 1973 she wrote a lengthy, handwritten letter to the European Commission of Human Rights, a body she had read about in a local newspaper, complaining that her human rights had been violated. …The remarkable thing is that this working class woman – intelligent but not educated – somehow, without any legal advice, initiated going to the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg. The beauty was that this was the perfect forum to seek to redress her case’, and to award her legal aid.
The outcome?
‘The government (of Ireland) decided to fight the case and, when the court ruled in October 1979 in favor of Mrs. Airey, (the government) was required both to set up a system of civil legal aid and to simplify family law procedures.’ The power of one…very committed woman who held fiercely to her sense of her rights and of the desire for justice.
I also recently read Aimee Molloy’s stunning book, However Long the Night
Based on her time living in a remote African village, Molly Melching founded Tostan as an organization dedicated to empowering African women and men through human-rights-based education to promote relationships built upon dignity, equality, and respect. Molly Melching’s deep appreciation that real change comes from within led to groundbreaking strategies focused on better education, improved health care and hygiene, a decrease in child/forced marriage, and – crucially – to declarations by thousands of African communities to abandon the centuries-old practice of female genital cutting (FGC). Today, Tostan is working in 8 African countries and has changed the lives of over 2 million people.
The role that men play in this work as powerful advocates for ending FGC, and for supporting women to build a movement for change, is inspiring. The role the women played in clearly stating their hope and vision for their daughter to have a different future again speaks to the power of women’s organizing and to the root of feminism in defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. And in the process, many men spoke out about the positive effect the end of this practice would have on their own lives – happier, healthier wives and thus happier, healthier families.
Back in the US, this same message about the positive outcomes of feminism in practice was shared this week by Chris Hayes on MSNBC where he spoke about the results of a new Pew study demonstrating that, contrary to reportage on Fox News, feminism has made the family stronger.
“The amount of time both parents spend with their kids is double what it was in 1965. So, while the primary takeaway of feminism is how the movement affected women’s lives, the other side of it is the tripling of the time dads get to spend with their kids. It’s an incredible transformation both for men and for their kids, a huge net benefit in human happiness, …”
Chris Hayes goes on to say, “And I think about walking around my neighborhood in New York, seeing all these new dads my age, with kids on bikes, or being pushed in strollers, or hanging off them in some baby harness contraption. We have all been blessed with the gift of a society whose confines and restraints and structures were broken apart before we became dads.”
“This is the great gift of feminism to men: It took a sledgehammer to the must stultifying parts of patriarchy, including a vision of fatherhood in which dads were expected to be distant, stoic, removed creatures from their kids’ lives. And we have now a new and better social model, one that encourages fathers to be equal parents, and nudges them towards spending more of their time doing something that is going to make them happier: spending time with their kids.”
Back in Sausalito, I was enjoying the experience of being a big kid myself. A friend had left me a gift voucher for Sea Trek in Sausalito and so I signed up for a Sunday morning lesson in stand-up paddling. And that’s how I found myself paddling out to sea, first on my knees and then on my feet, even strokes as I passed sailing boats and kayaks – and further along, I passed harbor seals snoozing on their rocky ledge: a sleepy watching party to the parade of boats and other flotilla. “You know, it’s easier to keep your balance if you just keep paddling…and maybe that’s a life lesson!” I heard one woman paddler say to another. What she said seemed true; we could keep our balance, maybe even rebalance the world, if we just kept moving, and kept up those strokes.
I was headed for an open channel feeling free and light and, as I looked ahead, I saw a man and his young daughter paddling hard in a canoe with a white dog sitting on the edge of the vessel.
“You’re doing great, sweetie,” I heard the man say to his daughter.
“Daddy, this is fun! Maybe we can boat around the world and take Max and make people feel better?”
“Evie, you don’t have to sail round the world, you’ll make people feel better just with your attitude of giving back and with your smart thinking.” And as if to agree, Max, the dog, gave a bark and stood up and then, in a split second, made the leap into the water, paddling hard with a kind of maniacal grin on his face.
That was it for me. The Dad, the daughter, the dog and the busting out into the water, into the world. Here was compassion, wellbeing, wisdom and wonder playing out, here was a girl being affirmed in important ways. I pulled hard on my paddle to flip my board around and head toward home. This gal was for the turning.