Build your boat- notes from journal entry 9-3-11

Right now I am thinking about the conversation that Therman and I had while on my way to work yesterday morning. We talked about legacies and what we will pass on to our children, to the children of the world, to the world after we leave. We discussed the relevance of leaving our thoughts and ideas.

It is easy for one to take the attitude, "Who me? The world doesn't need my two cents." Yes, your cents too. For me, it was Anne Frank's two cents that shed the best light on what she and many Jews experienced during their persecution. As a seventh grader, reading her words, I hid in the basement with her. I heard the footsteps she heard. Cried when she cried. I believe that all of us have a story to tell a particular way to a particular people. Now, we may not know who our audience is, for some of us, the audience may not even be born yet. But that's not our job to worry about that. Our charge, I believe, is to put the work out there. Take the pictures, tell the stories, write the poems, build the houses, sew the clothes, find the cure. Each one of us is charged, as Noah was, to build the boat. Whatever your boat.

Telling your story, as you know if you know me, is something I am passionate about. As Therman and I discussed, we, black Americans especially, come from a people who kept quiet about such things as domestic violence and sexual abuse, even a lot of the racial prejudice experienced wasn't verbally expressed. I do understand that the silence could have been the best way they felt to protect themselves and their families. But we can use our voices now to help someone going through what we went through. We can use our voices now to gift the world with our view of the elephant. I invite you now to push beyond how insignificant you think you are or your story is. I invite you to get so busy living your life and taking in your story, so busy building the boat you were charged to build, that when others cross your path you have headspace enouch, decency enough to see that she is building her boat. She is just leaving his legacy. Acknowledge them for it. Appreciate the courage it takes to fully live a life. You fully living your own leaves you little desire and time to judge others. In fact, consider that every judgment of someone else is you physically taking a plank of wood off a boat they are building. Imaginge the time and energy it takes to literally do that. And at no benefit to you. No benefit to the world.

I think about people who have produced popular movies and written popular books and the many many people who came along later just to criticize the work. The critiques are often very well written and thought out and so I wonder why the critic just doesn't spend time creating his or her own art. But then that is my judgment, I guess, on them.

A few months ago I was listening to a friend and super hero of a poet, Nyasha Khalfani read a poem she wrote about us caring for other human beings, being concerned about something outside of ourelves. In the poem, and I wish I had it in front of me, she said, when a woman comes up to you and needs..."have the decency to stop the world." "The decency to stop the world." I love that line so much. It inspires me to care enough about another man's, another woman's journey to give more than I take. Whether or not I am going where he or she is going on their path. "The decency to stop the world."