I
I faltered only once, during my INSEAD executive course on leadership and AI
“Turn to your neighbour, talk to them about someone who you admire that faced the frontier.”
The words caught in my throat as my mind went to my parents. Who lived a life so diminished by poverty and illness but still carried on. As my neighbour finished, my thoughts raced in terror – I’d focused on staying calm and listening purposefully.
Now the embarrassment and shame rose within...what a sad man to have no one left to look up to.
“Jen,” I said, “my fiancé. She has lived her life with so much courage and just finished her Executive MBA. She built an amazing career, without ever doing a degree. And stepped out into the unknown of digital with no technical background.”
As I spoke, the heat fell from my chest. The tears retreated into their ducts. And my voice stilled with a sense of love and calm.
II
Last month Mum passed away. Three years after Dad. The same month I got engaged.
I am not yet forty. Yet I often feel I have lived an age.
I spent my youth dreaming of futures not yet imagined that have now arrived.
And my adulthood reliving the past – reveries, pain and everything in between. I don’t suppose I am unique but perhaps I am the long tail.
The job of adulthood is to metabolise your experiences and translate them into something better for those that come after you. Be it your children, your employees, your friends, family and even neighbours. Metabolising emotions so often happens in the dark. Metabolising pain is mostly sped up through practice. Exposure. Repetition.
The job of life is to realise that you are both perfect and imperfect all at once.
III
As adults and executives there remains a taboo of sharing publicly too much of your pain. Particularly as a man. It makes people wince. Whisper. “Why doesn’t he keep that to himself.” Speak only of approved topics, safe topics, expected topics.
As a child, I kept my own counsel. Observing and absorbing. My year 2 teacher asked me – “You’re so quiet, well mannered, calm. Even whilst other kids are so loud and cruel. Especially to you.”
I wasn’t abused. But still, I didn’t want to tell her about the fights, the sirens, the crime, the hospitals, the screaming, the nights without electricity, without a bed.
So, I picked the safe terrain. “My parents fight, a bit.”
“What would you like me to do about it, she asked?” Looking at me, eagerly, hungrily. Sensing an opportunity to be a hero or nosy. Or both.
“I guess you could write them a letter.”
I secretly wished she would. But regretted the words the moment they left my throat. Truth escaping like an evil genie. She reported it instead and lost her job. The fallout that followed taught me a lesson I took with me forever. A lesson reinforced by Mum’s screams, tirades and relentless ranting.
“Don’t you ever, EVER, share what goes on inside our family ever again.”
I kept my promise. Despite everything.
IV
Life is very curious and very mundane. Death and dreams live side by side. Love and loss go hand in hand. That is the price of living life forwards and understanding it backwards.
Memories linger, and the best ones often come with an ache you’ll never be able to scratch. Because memories are places you cannot go back to and people, once they are gone, can never hear the words you wish you would’ve said.
My parents were good and wonderful people. They did their best and their legacy is written in the words I type. In my oldest brother’s sense of adventure passed down to his beautiful little kids. In my middle brother’s rapacious reading and life of quiet contentment. We are all good men, thanks to them.
I struggle to express my emotions. I absorb them until they sometimes leak out. Mostly in tears, sometimes in anger. I struggle to let go. I struggle to rely on others. To have self-worth that isn’t linked to achievement. To stop. To breathe. Struggle, struggle, struggle.
Since Mum passed away, I’ve encountered the very best of life and people. Life is beautiful. I spoke at my mother’s funeral with my boss, who’s like a father figure, my family, my fiancé and my best friends by my side. It was perfect. She had a good end.
I’ve had the most exceptional feeling of possibility since Jen said yes. And amidst these twin peaks of love and grief, I boarded a flight to Europe for my fortieth, for an INSEAD AI executive course, for a reunion.
I do too much and leave no time for myself. I suspect the same is true for most people I’ve met at INSEAD.
V
At the start of the trip, walking in the stark beauty of Antiparos, two of my closest friends spoke with me about shame. Their own, and mine. Sometimes misplaced but real, felt and lived.
Where does shame live? Deep. Dark. Mostly illegible. It’s usually wrapped up in multiple things, layered and funky. Like a piece of cheese where you can’t quite tell if the mould is meant to be there until you cut through to the core.
We finished our walk and stumbled away from the rugged Grecian coastline where flecks of salt spray touched our legs and towards the dusty interior of the tiny island that was temporarily our home. The landscape turned away from the light towards the dark, dust filling every pore of our skin and settling on every inch of our clothes. The arid desert interior belying the plentiful seawater enveloping it.
As we enjoyed our now ritualistic morning coffee with our other friends, I felt nothing but joy and gratefulness. Light, as far as the eye could see and as far as the arrow of time could stretch. Backwards and forwards.
I looked at my friends as they spoke and wondered if they knew how much their little kindness had meant to me. If they even knew it as a kindness. Disrupting their morning run twice on the trip so I could join. My weight and injury permanently marking me as someone who doesn’t run or once ran – which ultimately becomes the same thing because we never can fully know the person who came before us. Including ourselves.
I wonder if they knew my mind had returned to all the times before I did a triathlon with them, where I looked at others in the water or jogging the coastline and tore my heart apart with hatred at the body who could not join them or the soul who did not have the courage to try to change.
I wonder if they realised how effortless their kindness is. How them it is. How blessed they are to be who they are. And how lucky I am to be their friend.
V
I wonder if a week later, my INSEAD alumni from the previous year knew how much it meant to me to hear some of them speak sincerely and earnestly about my writing. With no sneers of “How do you find the time?” or raised eyebrows from not staying in my lane.
One of them remarking “The Odyssey piece? That was your masterpiece.”
The silent little boy wept quietly with joy.
At the end of trip, I wrote something down as I watched tourist after tourist photograph Monet’s awe-inspiring water lilies. They filled the room, curving and enveloping you as the scene turned from dawn to dusk to twilight. And yet, they did not even look. Perhaps they will look later at their tiny little screens and wish they had a memory.
“Why has photographing art become more important than experiencing it? Perhaps a romantic world no longer exists. Perhaps technology has taken the romance out of the world. Perhaps AI will make us bring it back. Perhaps.”
If there is no romance left in the world, then we will build a new one. Out of the possibilities and paradoxes that always remain in life. I hope you will join me there.
