Hakuna Matata

Remember Pumbaa? Every safari park or game reserve you go into has a Pumbaa or two hundred, haughty walk, tail erect into the air like a radio antennae. Apparently they are the most stupid of all creatures (The more I see and learn, the more I think Disney got it spot on in The Lion King). A wart hog has a memory span of about 5 minutes. It forgets what it was doing and where it was going, so after running like crazy for a few minutes it stops and asks itself “where was I going in such haste?”, only to discover what he’d forgotten the moment the lion arrives with its jaws around its neck…”oh, yes, that’s why I was running”.

Yesterday we spent the day in the Solio Game Reserve – the largest population of Rhino’s that you can ever imagine amongst other notable friends such as the giraffes and baboons and waterbucks. The afternoon before we went on a walking Safari in the Aberdare National park.

All this to say, we are ‘chilling out” for a few days before heading back to Nairobi tomorrow. When the kids were young we used to call them ‘down days” or “bummy days” (as in, ‘bum around’)

I’ve been reminded in these few days of a quote by Salman Rushdie (who one doesn’t often get to quote) who said
                       ‘Those who do not have the power of the story that dominates their lives – power to           retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times may change – truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts’

The view of Mt Kenya from our room at dusk

“Think new thoughts”.
As we’ve been unwinding, it isn’t that we end up thinking about nothing, but we now have the space to think new thoughts. Whether it’s standing in breathtaking silence looking as far as the eye can see in every direction and seeing the most beautiful expanse of space, under the watchful presence of Mount Kenya, or marveling at the tapestry of tree shapes and colours and entwining wonder, in the wetland valleys of Solio, whether it’s what we are seeing or what we cant see….everything allows our minds to wander to new places.

Even the people we meet by just stopping and making time. A casual ‘hi’ turned into hours of conversation and lunch with a delightful Palestinian couple who are working for UNICEF and who shared with us perspectives on Palestine, the middle east, what its like to live with an Israeli tank at the end of your street - a view of the world that has enriched our own.


So what kind of new thoughts?
- Meeting the Palestinian couple opened up new possibilities for our next steps... or maybe not
- We’ve created two new short programmes, Leadership for Life and Leadership for Legacy to support our flagship Leadership for Hope programme
- We’ve looked at what we’ve achieved so far this autumn and what we haven’t and where we are stuck and how to turn the difficulties on their heads
- Jane has been working on her longed for book on helping children to understand the power of their awesome brains in developing resilience for their young and future lives
- We reflect on the power of silence and ‘not knowing’ and how the ‘life’ of new thinking emerges from the ‘death’ of simply stopping, being and waiting in the silence
- We’ve been reading Susan Glenks research book on how people seem to either have a fixed mindset in life or a growth mindset and how this shapes our approach to every aspect of our life….and that then set our minds thinking about the work we are doing and how one of these mindsets shapes peoples response to what we’re teaching

- ….and Jane is drawing…wonderful drawings that continue to feed her soul and enrich my heart and eyes


All this without trying. We haven’t been trying to find anything. We just slowed down; stopped; and made a space, a space for new thoughts….and like the elephants that come to the watering holes in the quiet of the evening, so new thoughts have just found their ways into our hearts and heads.

TW