Walking to work early morning on Valentine’s Day I was feeling curiously light in spite of the weather and the weight of my crimson coat. A streetsweeper stopped sweeping and rested on his broom. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Miss,” he said, with twinkly eyes and a crooked grin. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” I smiled back.
Further on, people were lined up for their own heart starter. Hundreds of people queued outside of Saint Francis of Assisi for a morning cup of coffee. So many people sleeping rough on the streets and here, on this street, is community. People coming together to talk with their warming drinks as they wake to a new day, and to just stand together. “You do this every day?” I asked one of the people dispensing coffee. “Every day of the year,” he nodded, not losing a beat with his coffee making.
At work, a donor comes to see me to say she would like to find funds to create a US version of the work we do internationally. It’s a natural response to want to help those in our own community, whose faces and loss of hope we see every day. I hear the voice of Stella Cornelius, founder of the Conflict Resolution Network, as she always, always, sought to open up options rather than to close them down and who was such a fierce and tireless advocate for ‘work for all who need it.’ Yes, I think, there is great need here although the level of poverty in many other countries is crushing and overwhelming in ways not imaginable to some. So, let’s create something in the US so that people may also see what’s possible and needed in other countries. Let’s extend our giving, our understanding, our generosity rather than containing it.
Meanwhile, I’ve received an invitation from Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, the extraordinary and courageous Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning in Afghanistan, which has done so much to give women and girls an education. She has emailed to ask me to attend a conference on Love and Forgiveness that she’s hosting in Afghanistan in April. In her letter she says ‘As you know, there has been 32 years of war in Afghanistan…We have lost millions of people… We want peace… Deep inside, I know that when you educate, you will bring knowledge and wisdom, and you will transform the society. Proudly, I can say to you that today we see the impact of education and that it has brought much transformation. But unfortunately that is not enough. People have lost faith and trust, and instead feel revenge toward each other. …This conference provides an opportunity to return to the basic beliefs of love and forgiveness in order to restore human values’.
Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.
~Paul Boese
Later in the day I head to a gathering where I’ve been asked to be one of the host party. It’s an event on gender-led investing and the venue is a penthouse suite on 9th Avenue, inhabited by a highly intelligent woman who has made her money in financial markets and is now moving just as fast to invest in good work. “I’m interested in policy change and strategic shifts”, she says to me bluntly and with a smile. “I’m also interested in sustainable systemic support for women that lifts them beyond microfinance”. There is something about her positivity, her keen intent, that infuses the room of 100 individuals with a warm optimism , a raising the bar of conversation, subtle yet felt. I’m sure that real deals and partnerships will be struck this night that will increase opportunities for women and lead to decision-making by Boards that is gender inclusive.
I go and sit on a nearby couch next to a woman and whose dress and demeanour variously reminds me of Audrey Hepburn and Katherine Hepburn- such classic style and grace and elegance coupled with a steely belief in women’s independence. When I tell her I did my Masters in Peace and Conflict Resolution she says she wants to learn more and please could I send her a book list. She says she is longing to know more about how conflict resolution skills can best be practiced. And please come and visit her on the wide desert plains of Arizona where she lives. She is delightful in her exuberant energy and openness. Her daughter, herself a professional in the finance world, is listening nearby and says “you should go, you’ll have fun.”
I walk out into the night, Three Statues of Liberty walk by with their dogs. How I love this city with its giddy, electric energy, its manifold contradictions and extremes and its ‘anything goes’ parade of characters and citizens who are variously living rough, rich, ready or occupied. And those who are the change-makers, the brave-hearts, those who, as Rachel Maddow says, are the ‘paradigm-shifters that change the questions that get asked, not just the answers.’ As I walk I find an abandoned skateboard and so I skate a little, wheeling toward home and toward Josh, my own valentine.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
Jane Sloane