When I travel, I almost always take my Kehinde Wiley tote bag with me. This started on Kilimanjaro. I had a vague sense that it would be fun to have my picture taken with the tote at the summit. I wasn’t wrong. When we finally made it there, I took off my backpack and pulled out the tote bag. All of the mountain guides laughed as I slid the straps over my shoulder. “Shopping?,” they asked, chuckling.

I really love the picture my guide took.

A few weeks later I stood on the Spiral Jetty for the very first time in my life after dreaming of it and adoring it from afar for nearly 25 years. Back in the ’90s when I was an Art History undergrad, I’d learned about it. But back then the water level was much higher, so high that the jetty couldn’t be seen at all. Times change. So it happened that we were in town, and I convinced a few family members to help me find it. We drove miles and miles, first along highways and then down miles of gravel road. Eventually we found it. Mid-day sun beat down on us as we scampered over rocks and across the dried up shoreline of the Great Salt Lake.

My sister took this photo.

I’ve managed to take the tote to a few other places, too. It’s fun taking the arts everywhere.

Think about all the stuff people have made – all of it – throughout all the history of forever.

Every single tool, every item of clothing, every building, every machine, every work of art, every song and musical instrument, every single book or research study or scientific discovery. What would you say is the best out of all of everything that anyone has ever made?

I got a degree in one small slice of that vast range of production: Western Art History. I learned from my studies that throughout time, artists had tried and tried and tried some more to imitate nature, to pay homage to it, to do it justice, to show their appreciation for it by capturing it any way they could, in paint or stone or bronze. With the invention of cameras and computers, they tried that too.

But no artist, however skilled they may be – no person is going to make anything even half as amazing as a sunset, a duckling or a spring blossom. Simply, in the contest between what nature creates and what people create, nature wins.

But the question interests me anyway: what is the best thing that humanity has ever produced? Humans have made some incredible things after all. Consider the terra cotta warriors, the Taj Mahal, the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids and Stone Henge, to say nothing of modern marvels like rocket ships and cellphones. All amazing, but none of them are the best – at least not to me.

I reserve that designation for this:

It was operational by 1957. Even then, it wasn’t the biggest accelerator, but it was the only one jointly owned by the founding members. Nowadays, the Synchrocyclotron is a museum piece, which is why I was able to take a selfie with it when I visited in 2016 and took a tour.

To this day, CERN is home to the largest and most sophisticated particle collider on Earth — and the research facility is still jointly owned by a consortium of nations that cooperate in the pursuit of the furthest horizons of scientific discovery, without either a military motive or a profit motive. The research facility is always in demand, and of course, this has led to a lot of publishing.

So it’s not surprising that the researches there needed a better information management system. So they came up with a good one, so good in fact that our internet browsers have their ancestry in the referencing system developed at CERN. This just makes me love it even more.

So as I see it, CERN is the best thing that people have ever made, ever, throughout all the history of humans making things. I know of nothing else like it, and the fact of its existence makes me feel proud and happy to be alive.

I took a class in 2015 on human trafficking. One day we discussed rescuing trafficked people, and the unfortunate probability that people who are rescued will fall prey to traffickers again. Why? Our professor said it was because victims of trafficking are disempowered in ways that make them more vulnerable to repeated exploitation.

So rescuing someone from a bad situation is the start of a recovery process rather than its finish line.

I see similarities between this and what it takes to leave a cult, reject authoritarianism or break off abusive relationships. Those are also starting places, and survivors need increased empowerment if they are to remain free.  

From my class notes, here’s the list of eight keys to empowerment.

1. Having decision-making power over your own life
2. Having access to a range of information sources
3. Having a range of options to choose from
4. Having an understanding your rights
5. Being able to effect change in yourself and your community
6. Being able to develop skills you value
7. Being able to trust yourself and your competency
8. Being able to increase your positive self-image

I feel encouraged by this list, and I want every person to have all of this.

Every now and then I use the list as an inventory for a self-assessment. How empowered am I? Are things better than they used to be? Where do I want to go from here?

On 14 June 2023, I reached the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa and the tallest freestanding mountain on Earth. It wasn’t my first time hiking a mountain, but it was my first time above 14,000 ft and my first time in Africa and the Southern Hemisphere. Maybe this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d expect from an editor living in middle America. I get that. But my interest in climbing Kilimanjaro did not come out of nowhere. Nothing ever does.

My first mountain was Kinabalu, rising 13,400 ft over Borneo. I climbed it with my daughter, Danielle, while she was on a school break during what would become the last few normal weeks before COVID-19 changed everything in 2020.

There’s no way for me to think about my experience on Kilimanjaro without reference to Kinabalu. I consider reaching both summits to be among the most meaningful moments of my life, and those memories call up a curious cocktail of emotions. I’m terribly proud that we did it, and also a little chagrinned by how much it cost and how much ego it took. I’m aware of that. But I’m also dumbfounded that I had the nerve for it, specifically that the versions of me that existed in March of 2023 and January of 2020 made the call to go for it.

Good luck had an obvious hand in our successes, but I also know how hard it was to get there, and I know that at the end of the day I’m the one who made it happen. And making it happen was much more than just the planning and the preparation. What reaching the summit really required was the capacity–my capacity–minute by minute and step by step to be my own best friend and cheerleader, to believe I would not fail and that I could continue despite every difficulty. I did that for two days on Kinabalu and seven days on Kilimanjaro.

I’m proud of it in an out-of-body way, as though this story belongs to someone else. But it’s mine. I gave a presentation on this experience at the Ethical Society of St. Louis in August. A recording of my remarks is on their YouTube channel.

I adapted this essay from a short address I gave at the Ethical Society of St. Louis on 16 April 2023.

For most of 2012 and 2013, I worked as an Editor in the language services unit at the United Nations in Beirut. Most of my colleagues specialized in Arabic-English translation, and even back in 2012, they were using a range of machine translation tools. My colleagues were dedicated to working with these technologies for at least two reasons: first, most of them loved Arabic more than Ken loves Barbie, and they were adamant about the future of Arabic; and second, my colleagues were well aware of the UN’s institutional commitment to working with machine translation, and they were determined that the Beirut office would lead in all matters related to Arabic.

Machine translation came up in many staff meetings. I gathered that it was tedious and time-consuming, unpredictable and unreliable. Everything had to be checked and corrected, and no one had space for what seemed like extra work. Discussing these challenges, one colleague explained that this was not wasted effort. She encouraged our unit to keep on feeding the machine, to keep on giving it examples of correct translations, to keep on building the tool. Machine translation was only as good as the examples fed into it.

Well it has been more than a decade since then. I moved to Bangkok and the technology moved on and now everyone is talking about machine learning and AI. For example, I was on the meditation subreddit the other day and scrolled past a comment that hit home:

To which all I can say is, BRO me also too.

The one thing I know about AI echoes a general and unavoidable truth about ourselves. Versions of this relationship – inputs to outputs – are just about everywhere. This month we celebrate Earth Day, and a harrowing inputs-outputs relationship is right there in the pollutants we dump into the environment that then build up in our own blood.

But I’ll focus now on how it turned up for me, in terms of race. Maybe you can relate to my experience – about a decade ago the murder of unarmed black children and adults began showing me something about the data set I was trained on. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. And then Michael Brown in Ferguson rocked my world, a world away in Bangkok. And it just kept on happening. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. Breonna Taylor. And by the time we got to George Floyd, I knew my data set had blinded me to multiple forms of systemic racial injustice, and I had to own my own blindness. The racism I was born into followed me everywhere I went in the world, and I had replicated it, uncritically, without a gun to my head.

I began to change my inputs, what I followed, read and watched. I began feeding myself a better data set; one that represented more of the real world and less of the white one. More of the Global South and less of the West. More of the 99% and less of the 1%.

There is power in how we use our attention and focus, in who we include and exclude, in what we replicate and what we disrupt. I encourage you and me and all of us to be intentional and critical about the data sets we train ourselves on. Be as critical as you would be about the food you eat, the air you breathe and the water you drink. Be careful of what you are building, because, as my colleague said in 2012, this is not wasted effort.

I write whether I have a reason or not, though as reasons go, this was a good one. But it wasn’t just having a reason. It was having a deadline, limits and structure, and a central question. What is my story? More specifically, what story would I tell on stage in a show of readings in celebration of Mother’s Day?

For me writing is a way to cut through the noise to what I actually think, and whether it’s academic or artistic, personal or professional doesn’t matter. I hardly know anything until I spend some time putting words down on the page. I write my way toward myself.

For days the question was on my mind and eventually I googled “how many words are in a 5 minute speech?” for a ballpark estimate. With that word count in mind, I spent a few days writing and writing, knowing that most of it would end up on the cutting room floor. And on March 12th I sent in a story I could read in under 5 minutes. My story was short and honest and real.

I was invited to audition, and a few days later I was welcomed into the cast. It’s a true honor to be part of this production, which is full to bursting with stories of the bravery, resilience and miracle of motherhood. Tickets benefit local charities and are on sale now.

Not long ago I heard an interview of a psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky, who recalled a dinner party conversation on New Year’s Eve: 

“. . . we asked each other the question, what is the best event that happened that year and what was the worst thing that happened to us that year? For most people, the best and the worst event was the same thing. It was like someone got laid off from a job but then they got an even better job, or they broke up a relationship but now they’re happier or they’re in a better relationship. So yeah, it really has always struck me how that showed that the best thing and the worst thing can be the same thing.”

It’s paradoxical, the intertwining of best and worst. I believe Lyubomirsky is right, and yet I’ll still go to some trouble to avoid life’s worst things. I still hope they never happen.

But of course, they do happen. We hit rough patches, disaster strikes, we take a fist to the face, and those moments reveal the truth in the paradox of bad things: that they never stand alone. Good and bad things are bound up together. Nothing lasts forever.

In moments when you’ve been knocked around and flung off course, that’s when you’ll know for sure who and what will catch you when you fall. That’s when you’ll know you’re stronger than a punch in the face. That’s when you become the person who survived it, dusted herself off and lived to tell the tale from a position of greater confidence, self-knowledge and power.

Last year when things were really quite hard I came across an affirmation that stuck with me. It goes something like, “everything will be OK in the end, and if things aren’t OK, then it’s not the end”. It matters that the story keeps unfolding, that there are twists and turns in the path ahead. When things are not OK, the paradox of bad things is like a promise that good things are coming. Just wait. They’re coming.

It was maybe a year ago that I first read the poem “A Settlement” by Mary Oliver.

Someone had sent around just the last few lines as Instagram art and it was arresting. It leveled me. The words reverberated in me. They caught me and held me. It was when I googled them that I encountered the full poem, which only amplified the impact.

And so dark past . . .

Months later I realized that the author wasn’t unknown to me. I’d read her before. I’d loved her words before. But, like I said, that wasn’t until months later. She’s the author of the very well known poem The Summer Day, which I am glad I never have to live without.

Mary Oliver is prolific. She’s written so much, and not every poem is a stand-out gem. Like, she had a bestseller that was all poems about dogs.

Dogs.

For me, the truly life-changing poems of Mary Oliver are like needles in a very big haystack.

But you know, that just makes me love her more for showing me that my own ratio of haystacks to needles is nothing to be ashamed of. I am up to my eyebrows in haystacks while praying for needles.

Here it is, that amazing gem, a proverbial needle in a haystack.

Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

*
Therefore, dark past,
I’m about to do it.
I’m about to forgive you

for everything.

“A Settlement” by Mary Oliver

I’m no fan of the long hours, the long weeks of cold and dark so far north where I grew up. It’s a pleasure though, truly, to witness so beautiful a sunrise at a downright easy time to be awake. We have had days of glorious colors, morning and evening, the sky on fire. It’s awe-inspiring, heart-expanding, gratitude-inducing. It’s perfect.

I could not agree more.

They’re working overtime to distract from the narcissist’s bottomless emptiness.

Of course, we also need an agent, publicist & public relations team. Leaving aside the narcissist for a moment, here’s what that would look like for a healthy person.

The agent says no to any unworthy use of time. The agent knows what is beneath you or would devalue you and passes on it.

The publicist provides constant reminders of this truth: you are nothing less than awe inspiring and deserving. The publicist worships the ongoing evolution of the miracle that is you.

The public relations team puts your best foot forward. They remind you to be kind, to do your self care, to smile for no one but yourself simply because it feels good to smile, and to be the kind of person who makes the world a little bit better however and wherever you can.

The agent, publicist & public relations team are a helpful cast of characters, but that’s all they are. They’re not the truth. They’re not a false self. They simply illustrate a vital aspect of self care in a world that is sometimes a little too unkind; a world that veers, strays from safety.