Celebration of Life
It's been a weighty yet inspiring 24 hours. Yesterday evening, before heading to the first Hong Kong Ambassadors for Design Happy Hour, I received an email with the most sad and shocking news. OW had passed away suddenly from a brain tumor. A couple years ago, he had quit his investment banking job to spend more time with his young children and pursue his love of Ironman and ultra-marathon races, raising money for many a worthy cause along the way. He was a geniune, good guy and a great cook. And he wasn't even 40.
I was still in shock from the news at lunchtime today when I wandered in on some guys in the office watching Coach Carter, a film I had never even heard of starring Samuel Jackson acting out the life of the real Ken Carter. Coach Carter had locked out the members of his undefeated high school basketball team because they had failed to live up to their agreement to maintain a certain grade point average in their studies. The parents and community wanted the team to continue playing and asked the school board to end the lock out. Let down by a community that valued basketball victories over the education of its students, Coach Carter quits. But in this scene, the students persuade him to stay. It made me think of OW and how brightly he shone and how many people he must have inspired.
The movie also reminded me of the power of one person to change lives; it just takes one person to have faith in another. As if the universe was somehow conspiring to make this message stick, the New York Times landed in my inbox with a special section on Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech. Obama's faith in the idea/ideal of America often gets derided by his critics as being naive, impractical and impossible to achieve. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has said, "But he won't be able to change anything".
And his critics are half right. He alone won't be changing anything. It's the American people, as a society and as individuals coming together, that will make change happen. Obama is essentially playing the Coach Carter role. He's making Americans believe in our own ability to live up to the ideal. There will be no change unless we dare to hope. There will be no change unless we come out to vote. And even then, there will be no change without our own "blood, toil, tears and sweat" (apologies to Churchill). Yes, our nation is scarred from failing to live up to our own ideals, but as Obama reminds us, our strength as a nation is that we believe the ideals are worth striving for, no matter how far we may still be from their attainment: "This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected".
"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation."
Obama's message resonates because he accepts that we are imperfect human beings, but he also tells us that is no excuse not to aspire and strive to become greater. Obama was speaking to Americans, but America does not have the monopoly on hope and change (even though we've somehow branded it "The American Dream"). OW's life is another inspiring example of a life lived in the passionate pursuit of perfection. He was a Kiwi.
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Postscript:
As I was writing this entry, I found out that British director Anthony Minghella, best known for directing The English Patient and scripting The Talented Mr Ripley, also passed away yesterday.
I was still in shock from the news at lunchtime today when I wandered in on some guys in the office watching Coach Carter, a film I had never even heard of starring Samuel Jackson acting out the life of the real Ken Carter. Coach Carter had locked out the members of his undefeated high school basketball team because they had failed to live up to their agreement to maintain a certain grade point average in their studies. The parents and community wanted the team to continue playing and asked the school board to end the lock out. Let down by a community that valued basketball victories over the education of its students, Coach Carter quits. But in this scene, the students persuade him to stay. It made me think of OW and how brightly he shone and how many people he must have inspired.
The movie also reminded me of the power of one person to change lives; it just takes one person to have faith in another. As if the universe was somehow conspiring to make this message stick, the New York Times landed in my inbox with a special section on Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech. Obama's faith in the idea/ideal of America often gets derided by his critics as being naive, impractical and impossible to achieve. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has said, "But he won't be able to change anything".
And his critics are half right. He alone won't be changing anything. It's the American people, as a society and as individuals coming together, that will make change happen. Obama is essentially playing the Coach Carter role. He's making Americans believe in our own ability to live up to the ideal. There will be no change unless we dare to hope. There will be no change unless we come out to vote. And even then, there will be no change without our own "blood, toil, tears and sweat" (apologies to Churchill). Yes, our nation is scarred from failing to live up to our own ideals, but as Obama reminds us, our strength as a nation is that we believe the ideals are worth striving for, no matter how far we may still be from their attainment: "This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected".
"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation."
Obama's message resonates because he accepts that we are imperfect human beings, but he also tells us that is no excuse not to aspire and strive to become greater. Obama was speaking to Americans, but America does not have the monopoly on hope and change (even though we've somehow branded it "The American Dream"). OW's life is another inspiring example of a life lived in the passionate pursuit of perfection. He was a Kiwi.
-----
Postscript:
As I was writing this entry, I found out that British director Anthony Minghella, best known for directing The English Patient and scripting The Talented Mr Ripley, also passed away yesterday.
posted by 10000miles at 19:56
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