The Danger of a Single Story

A totally inspiring and interesting talk by Chimamanda Adichie:

The Danger of a Single Story

Deja Vu on 12th April

Today reminded me of two days in Japan--the first and last days of my visit to Kyoto in September, on my way out of the country.

On the first day, I travelled an hour by train to Osaka in order to pick up some lost property. The previous day I had left a plastic bag containing my favourite black shawl and some Sakamoto Ryouma socks on the JR bus from Kochi. I had called JR up and managed to explain what I was looking for and where I had left it; they instructed me to visit the office at Osaka station the following day. When I arrived, however, my bag wasn't there; it had accidentally gone to Okayama. Thinking back now, perhaps the lost property staff were just curious to meet this shawl-and-historical-figure-sock-losing foreigner? In any case, I spent the morning going to Osaka, walking around the station for a while, and then going back to Kyoto, and that's why today reminds me of it. I left my hostel at 10AM checkout, dropped my backpack off in a storage locker at a downtown train station, and then, realizing that I had left my (new, pink!) umbrella in the hostel, went back to get it. Rather shorter than Kyoto to Osaka, and more successful, too.

On the last day in Kyoto, in spite of heavy rain I decided to go to a forested area in the north of the city. I arrived there, lightly damp, and got my feet totally soaked walking only a little ways into the forest. I glimpsed the big red tori gate of the temple in the forest, my actual goal. But the muddiness of the ground between me and the gate, and the fact that it was still raining and I wouldn't be able to take my camera out at all, lead me to give up at this point and take the next bus back to my hostel. I wanted to get to Tokyo by evening, and I didn't have much energy or enough time to do anything really good--and besides, it was raining--so I ended up heading straight to the shinkansen. It was a bit like that today. Because of my 6pm flight back to Sydney (which I will be boarding in not too long) I couldn't really do anything much, and a serious case of New Shoes Syndrome discouraged me from climing up to the Mount Coot-Tha lookout, so I spent the mid-day floating around the city on ferries and reading in parks, and then caught an earlier-than-necessary train to the airport.

I always feel bad when I waste time like this while travelling, but I guess it can't be helped.

DFW

Hey, my love letter to the RPL was the 100th entry on this blog! I had intended to make a big deal about it, but I forgot. And now I want YOU to forget, too, because for a change I have something more important to say.

While shamelessly reading the entirety of the blog of a volunteer teacher at the Asian University for Women (where I hope to be volunteering myself next year), I stumbled across David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
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If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
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This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.
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The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I can't possibly quote all of the good parts--go read the whole thing.

David Foster Wallace was a wise man and his death is a terrible loss.