Through the eyes of another...

“There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living” Nelson Mandela

Trevor & Lennox

What happens when you look at the world through someone else’s eyes? 

I’ve long known the saying, “Never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes", but what about inventing a saying like.. “Never assume you know your own or someone else’s story until you’ve looked at your life through another persons eyes”

Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, a few miles off the coast of our current Cape Town home, for 18 of his 27 incarcerated years. 

Jane and I made the emotional visit there in November last year (look back to the blogs In The Living Years & Shawshank Redemption last Oct & Nov). But yesterday we visited Robben Island for a second time. We took Lennox Plaatjies, our new Emerging Leaders Head of South Africa and our wonderful leads in Kenya, Purity Njue and Hassan Ongiri. We wanted to invest this experience in our leaders of the organization. I knew they would be enriched beyond measure – you can’t visit Robben Island and not be. What I hadn’t bargained for was the effect on us. Not just the effect of going there again, but the effect of having the same experience through the eyes of another.

When Lennox was a young boy and teenager he was the victim of Apartheid. It wasn’t just a ‘terrible thing happening in South Africa’ as we Brits experienced it, for Lennox it meant being turned away at a café that was empty, being told it was fully booked….purely because the colour of his skin. The same went for the busses he could not go on, the schools he could not attend, the beaches he was not allowed to swim on…..every aspect of his life was restricted by Apartheid. For Jane and I and millions like us, Nelson Mandela was and is an inspiration of courageous leadership. For Lennox he owed the very life he currently can live because of Mandela.

The rock quarry where Mandela toiled for 13 years

And I want to capture the moment in my heart forever standing outside Mandela’s six by six foot cell with Lennox yesterday, looking into it through the thick iron bars with tears rolling down his face and hearing him talk to Mandela like he was there, today, right now, alive…speaking to his dead spirit. Thanking him. Making a promise and a commitment to finish the work he started in South Africa. And thanking the countless others who are eclipsed by Mandela, who gave up their liberty and often their lives.

Mandela’s tiny cell

Why?

 ....So Lennox can send his children to a school he could never have gone to himself, sit at a restaurant with us and his lovely family, side by side, get the education and the job that has made him the great leader he is today. (Lennox has a unique perspective on prisons, as he was a prison governor before joining Emerging Leaders this year)

Yesterday Jane & I were humbled to the core, watching one man experiencing Robben Island for the first time... we saw it through the eyes of a man who was liberated and whose family was liberated by a man and a group of courageous women and men, who echoed Mandela’s words in their deep sacrifice....

“There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living” Nelson Mandela

Lennox and millions like him, see Robben Island through a profoundly different lens.

.....And today that set me thinking even further.

Mandela was a lawyer and he would and could have become a great human rights lawyer in Johannesburg. When did "Mandela, the lawyer" realize that he was “Mandela leader of people"? Mandela’s biography makes it clear that one of the answers is the late Walter Sisulu. Sisulu, at the time, was the pivot for ANC action against Apartheid, when the young lawyer Mandela arrived in Johannesburg.

''I had no hesitation, the moment I met him, that this is the man I need,'' Mr. Sisulu said in an interview shortly after the 1994 elections.

“Needed for what?”

''For leading the African people.''

Mandela, through the mentorship of Sisulu, saw himself through the eyes of another. He, like many, many of us, did not see his own full potential. It is often and sometimes only as we see ourselves through the eyes of another, that we see our own potential. Their vision of us, their belief in us, is what gives us the vision and the courage and the springboard to realising our own potential.

Hassan, Lennox, Purity & Jane outside the Robben Island High security Prison

“There is no passion to be found in playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living”  Nelson Mandela

- TW

Wonder or Wisdom?

Evening light on a South African Township

I’m caught..... When Aladdin meets the Genie he gets his 3 wishes.
When Solomon meets God, he gets to make his wishes. What to ask for?

Children carrying their precious tray of stones

Until recently it was a no brainer. Go with Solomon and ask for wisdom. Wisdom will always be vital for living life. It is the compass when there are no maps. It is the movement and direction when there are no train tracks laid down. It holds out the  way, when there doesn’t seem like there is a way. Who wouldn’t long for wisdom!



But now there’s a problem. The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hershel said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for Wonder”.

And the late Kate Gross talked about, ‘the recovering of wonder’, in her last years when she knew she was dying, aged 36. Is it recovery or discovery? Recovery would suggest that she had wonder as a child and had lost it. I think children do have a natural sense of wonder.



Kate quotes Michael Mayne’s letters to his grandchildren to sum up her feelings................... ”If I could have waved a fairy wand at your birth and wished upon you just one gift it would not have been beauty or riches or a long life: it would have been the gift of wonder”.

Herschel said “The world of things we perceive, is but a veil; its flutter is music, its ornament is science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. Its silence remains unbroken. No words can carry it away”.
What does that mean in reality?

...no words can carry it away

Kate recounts “Today I saw a child in a red coat & I experienced a moment of absolute, pure wonder……these last years have been so strangely luminous, full of exploration, wonder and love”

So the dilemma now is which one should I ask for? Wisdom or wonder? Of course why not dismiss the idea of a choice and just ask for both – wisdom and wonder. But what if you could only ask for one thing? And I’m a believer in 'the one thing’, because it brings focus and with focus there’s much more chance of success.

Kierkegaard says, a saint is someone who ‘wills the one thing’

Does one come before the other? Is there a natural order between the two?

No one ever mentioned ‘wonder’ to me before; or maybe I wasn’t listening. Was it wisdom for Solomon to ask for wisdom, rather than ask for wonder? He said basically ‘sell the farm to get Wisdom. Nothing trumps it”.


The nearest that I can get is that Wonder is about presence and Wisdom is about living.


We need presence and we need to know how to then live. We actually do need both. Wonder connects me with the presence of life – of God within me, of the life force within every tiny micro part of my life, the immortal diamond, the kernel of life within the shell of life. We need presence. I guess it’s the fuel for the day.

But we also need wisdom to live the day. How do I use and synthesise all of my life’s experiences so that I can make decisions each day about how I think, feel and act around the lives of those who surround me. How do I become an alchemist to all of the good, messy, painful, joyful, base-metal experiences of yesterday and make some gold for the steps ahead?

Trevor in the woods above Grabouw, at the Village of Hope, Z.A

Wonder and wisdom, the deeper faces of being and doing.

- TW