It’s a little over 6 month since my mother passed onto the other side. Today is her 83rd birthday, so in her memory, I will quote Haruki Murakami. Have a super Sunday.
“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.”
The central figure of Western culture is Jesus Christ. My parents come from Jamaica, so I was born and raised in London with Christian values. Fun fact: According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Jamaica with over 1,600 churches, has the most churches per square mile of any country in the world.What does the dying of Christ and resurrecting as a hero mean psychologically? I think it means that you learn things painfully and when you learn things painfully a part of you must die and that’s the pain. For example, when a dream is shattered, a huge part of you that constituted that dream must be stripped away and burned. Therefore, life is a constant procession of death and rebirth, and to participate in that fully is to allow yourself to be redeemed by it.
In my opinion, the good is the process of death and rebirth voluntarily undertaken – you are not as good as you could be, so let part of you die. And if someone comes along and says, “You know there’s some dead wood here and it needs to be burned but are you aware that if I burn it, it will be painful?” And I am fully aware that the thing that emerges in its place is something better. The secret of human beings, unlike any other species is that we can let our old selves die metaphorically and let our new selves be born, and that is exactly what we should do.
My sister works for a local authority in London and she has been rewarded for her work with a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). My sister has been helping disadvantaged children re-enter the education system. Leading her team on a day-to-day basis and meetings with head teachers, social workers and the police, it’s a tough job.
Marcus Rashford also received his MBE, he has been recognised for his drive to ensure no child in need went hungry during the pandemic. The ceremony took place yesterday at Windsor Castle and I am extremely proud of both my big sister and Marcus Rashford.
Well done and keep up the good work.
“The Duke of Cambridge was pleased to be back doing investitures in person, celebrating people across the UK who have gone above and beyond for their country and community.”
It’s the autumn holidays and I’m still coming to terms with the passing of my mother. As a parent you have a responsibility to guide your children through life and I am grateful to be spending some quality time with my son. The life crises have a way of stripping you of our old certainties and throwing us into chaos and I think the only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.
We live in an age of positive curation where everyone has a personal brand on social media and fear, anxiety and depression are on the rise. Challenges have a way of humbling us and knocking down our egos. The same thing can happen to two different people and one person may see it as a problem, something to complain about or run and hide from, the other can see it as an opportunity to learn and grow, and they dig in and push through. It’s not easy to shift our mindset to view challenges as opportunities, as it takes practice to change our instinctual reaction. Every day I reveal my vulnerable self and this fragility has enabled me to build up an emotional resilience necessary to tackle the next challenge.
I think what you learn from things not turning out the way you planned can give you a lot more texture and meaning. I definitely would not have seen the richness in my life if I had not suffered setbacks along the way, because without them I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am today, so I am extremely grateful. Success is not about getting things right the first time but stemmed from being able to look at one’s past honestly and then to correct missteps or errors of judgment.
The world is changing fast but certain things remain consistent, for example, you have the leverage to make it better. I don’t think your customers buy from you because they care about you, they buy from you because they care about themselves. There’s a huge difference between tell the others and find the others. To tell the others says, “I need your support, please tell everyone else.”
A Gen Z’er recently asked me, “How do I become popular?”
As long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. And as you gain life experience you will create your own blueprint for how you define popularity. I think we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.
“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
You filter everything you hear through your life experiences, your frame of reference. Everyone has different emotional thermostats and perhaps they have been set by how they were raised and developed by the traumas they may or may not have. I’ve learned how to tap dance around all the mental traps that most people who look like me tend to fall for. I have this wonderful ability to get moved by other people, some of whom I have never even met. I guess this is because I just the beauty in things. I have been training for years and years to develop practical empathy as people don’t know what I know and I don’t know what they know. And I am really comfortable with that - it’s all OK.
I don’t think that we change the whole world but if we try understand it, we will at least decode it and figure out a way to make it better for ourselves. If we can ask the below generic questions enough times, then this will help us change our perspectives and help us to evaluate where we stand:
What do you know?
What do you need?
What happened to you that led you to believe that in this moment you are being reasonable?
“Your results are just an outcome, they are not your worth.”
The six basic human needs provide a practical key for discovering one’s needs, behaviours, values and beliefs. They are the vehicles we use to meet our needs and these needs underlie and inspire every choice we make.
The first four are the needs of the personality and the final two needs are those of the Spirit:
Certainty - Everybody wants avoid pain and have assurance that our basic needs are met.
Uncertainty - We also crave variety, excitement and new stimuli.
Significance - We all need to feel unique, special and important.
Connection - We want to be loved and cared for and want a feeling of closeness with like-minded people.
Growth - We all have a need to grow and expand in our personal and professional lives.
Contribution - We have a desire to serve and support someone or something bigger than ourselves in a meaningful way.
This quotation has been rumbling around my head for years and it’s so true.
“It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny. ”
“Successful people work hard to earn respect, but they freely give it to every human being they come across. Showing respect, even to people who haven’t earned it earns you the respect of people who have.”
Today is my mother’s funeral.
Time is short, opportunity is scarce and the number of opportunities that we get to help somebody to find their story, that they can live inside, remember and elevate are very small.
Thanks mum ❤️
I don’t think that complete objectivity is possible! That’s a massive statement, but in reality If I led a media channel, for example, even if I didn’t mean for it to, it would naturally reflect some of my passions. So, when you have similarly educated people with similar backgrounds running all of the main media institutions, even if they don’t intend it, the outcome will obviously be biased. This week’s UEFA EURO 2020 Semi-Final between England and Denmark showed the problems with nationalism and how it makes people delusional and ugly. It’s hard to get better until you become humble.
I think the beauty of an action comes not only from when it becomes a habit, but also from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception and accuracy of response. The older I get, the more I realise that I am not compelled by any conditioning or programming from my past experiences or from my culture. Jamaican parent, British societal values and Danish awakening has stamped everything on me, fortunately, I am now in a position where I no longer react on the basis of my upbringing. I have learned how to experience things fully, both good and bad experiences. How to learn from them and then drop them, and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous ones. I travel light as I am uninfluenced by labels and titles, I just treat people with respect.
Even after 24 years of living in Copenhagen and being fluent, both oral and written. I am still surprised when confronted with the fact, that they will be always be biased towards a native Dane. “Birds of a feather flock together!”
Image via Shutterstock
I’m in the process of writing an obituary for my mother and there are so many things that I could write. I have just forwarded the first draft to my sisters for some input, as I need their opinions. I think that if you and your loved ones are healthy, you have a family that loves you, some good friends, food on your table and a roof over your head - then you are richer than you think.
We are the richest people on earth and we don’t even realise! And when I say this, it means that we are alive when we can see the moon and the stars at night. Please make sure that you take the time to appreciate these gifts, nourish yourselves with nature, with your breath, with quiet and stillness. This will give you the energy to deal with your pain and challenges.
After many years of illness, yesterday my mother closed her eyes for the last time 😕. We have lost our beloved wife, mother, sister, auntie, cousin, grandmother and great grandmother 💔. It’s a sad day for all of us who knew her 🤎.
“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost or you can accept that, and try to put together something that’s good. ”
c/o BBC
“Even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.”
I was recently humbled when one of Danish my friends introduced me as a “knowledge seeking gentleman”. I’m fully aware that I have had a rich lifestyle and have always strived for excellence in everything I do, even so, to be honest I was a little taken aback. Does this mean that I am still not comfortable being the hero of the story, or are the words of coach John Wooden too deeply engraved in my consciousness?
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. - John Wooden”
I want to leave a legacy because my life matters and my legacy will be passed on by the people that I have met on my journey. My legacy is pouring whatever I have experienced into whoever is listening and that’s proof that I was here. And if at the end of my life I have added something to your life that made you move forward then I contributed towards your journey. Whenever anyone asks about your journey, you will tell them about this guy you met and that’s how we as people have survived for centuries. My forefathers withstood slavery and so many other atrocities because in the mindst of all the horrendous things we experienced, we still clapped our hands and sang our songs. We still managed to be creative and we are still here! My people have been through lynching, rapes, burnings and killings. My legacy is that we danced and sang and survived. We had opposition, trouble and tears, and I don’t have to write anymore about that.
Agony will always find you on its own, its ecstacy and happiness that has to have your name on it. I’m sending you the potential to go beyond agony to the ecstacy of fulfilling everything you were created to be and that’s my legacy. It’s in the people that heard me, it’s in my children, it’s in my friends and colleagues. I write like I speak and it always sounds like I am having a conversation with a friend. I’m easy to find both online and offline, and if you can't find me it’s because I’m dead. I will be fruitful as long as I’m alive and can move, making the best use of my resources and time.
