Everyone’s a philanthropist… once we get around to it

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How can we help: Exploring how and why we give, and how we might do it better

“Instantaneous generosity”: it could be good for you

A family friend told me recently that he and his wife, both writers, wanted to get into philanthropy. It’s not something I often hear, outside my professional bubble. Giving makes you feel good, so why don’t more people do it regularly? 

Partly, I think, because there’s an assumption that philanthropy is only for the very wealthy.

Donations from the likes of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos get heaps of attention. The scrutiny is important. But it also means that the central characters in most philanthropy stories are business moguls, sports champions and Hollywood stars – no wonder the field can feel as distant a prospect as owning a superyacht. 

Continue reading “Everyone’s a philanthropist… once we get around to it” →

Microseasons, mentoring, and a marriage mix-up

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Three things I learned or loved this month

February: not so springy

We think of the natural world as following a four-part rhythm, but spring, summer, autumn, winter don’t always quite fit. A freezing cold March doesn’t feel like spring, and November can be “all wrong for autumn”, as the American writer Kurt Vonnegut observed. Instead, he suggested, there are six seasons in the year, including a ‘locking’ season in November and December to lead us into winter, and an ‘unlocking’, in March and April, before spring unfolds.

I came across Vonnegut’s six seasons last week, as part of a writing workshop inspired by Japanese microseasons – an ancient tradition in which the year is divided into 24 periods, and sub-divided into 72 even shorter ones.

Continue reading “Microseasons, mentoring, and a marriage mix-up” →

A labour of love: the infodemic managers

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How can we help: Exploring how and why we give, and how we might do it better

Collage, 3 March

Scrolling through Twitter can be an emotional rollercoaster: the good, the bad, the very ugly. One thing that’s especially hard to shake right now are the posts from exhausted doctors and nurses, begging us to understand that hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, begging us to take distancing rules seriously. Read the replies to such posts, and you’ll see the fake-news army chipping in to claim that the death rate has in fact not risen, that Covid is just like the flu, even that medics are lying about what’s happening before their eyes. 

A small but globally dispersed force has been armed to take on such untruths. Among them is a friend of mine, Debora, who is one of the 135 or so recently trained and certified by the World Health Organization as an ‘infodemic manager’. 

Continue reading “A labour of love: the infodemic managers” →

Kwa sababu ya corona

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Eid celebrations, Kigoma in western Tanzania, back in 2012

Every week my Kiswahili teacher asks me what I’ve been doing, and each time my answer comes with what’s become a useful phrase: I stayed at home, kwa sababu ya corona. I didn’t go to the office, kwa sababu ya corona. We can’t go to restaurants now, kwa sababu ya corona. My new phrase explains a lot: because of the coronavirus.

His reaction is always similar: a look of surprise and a shake of the head, as he concludes: Maisha ni magumu Uingereza: life is difficult in England. In Tanzania, my teacher says, people aren’t wearing masks and they aren’t avoiding crowds. Life is as normal because there is no corona in the country. 

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In sacred time

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To a new year of good adventure
Inspiration in advertising? I’ll take it

The shortest day of the year usually falls around 21 December. This year, as one Twitter user put it recently, “it’s the 296th of March”. 

His comment summed up the bizarre limbo that has been 2020. The rules and restrictions, the depressing and often surreal headlines, and the attempts at making real-life events and celebrations somehow as meaningful from behind a screen have all continued in an apparently never-ending loop of sameness. Recent vaccine success – a brilliant achievement – is a big step forward, but it still doesn’t offer a clear end point, or any transition in most people’s lives, yet. We mask up, we wait on.

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“They don’t know how smart they are. You can tell them.”

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How can we help: Exploring how and why we give, and how we might do it better

Who encouraged them to keep writing? (Photo: Unclaimed exhibition, Barbican 2019)

Much of my work involves moulding and tweaking other people’s writing into shape. But with R and C, I never fix spelling mistakes or question confusing sentence structures. I never wince when they go off topic, never strike through nonsensical ideas.

R and C are writers – nine and ten-year-old ones – who I’ve been working with at the Ministry of Stories, an east London charity. It’s quite a contrast to my day job, which generally doesn’t involve learning about a monster’s detachable limbs or the newly-discovered land of Japina. Nor does my day job often allow the luxury of focusing entirely on one person and one task. 

Continue reading ““They don’t know how smart they are. You can tell them.”” →

“Success is not guaranteed”: writing as exploration

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Unpredictable outcomes

Years of formal education have drummed into us the idea of essay as formula, a rigid structure to follow. That structure may have helped to organise your thinking, but essay-writing also sparks less positive memories: of set titles that fail to inspire, non-negotiable deadlines, struggles to meet a particular word count. 

Go back to the original meaning of the term, though – from the French essayer, ‘to try’ – and the essay becomes a whole lot more interesting. 

I was reminded of this in a recent Vox podcast about the work of Albert Camus, which also explores why he chose the essay form. 

“An essai is a trial, it’s an attempt. And… success is not guaranteed,” says Robert Zaretsky, a philosopher and historian, interviewed on the podcast.

Continue reading ““Success is not guaranteed”: writing as exploration” →

Protest the future, redeem the present

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Midlife protest - collage by Anna Patton
Collage, 6 July

In ‘Midlife: A philosophical guide’ MIT professor Kieran Setiya seeks answers to the doubts and fears of his own mid-30s from philosophy. He teases apart the reasons that so many people struggle with this stage of life, and how to start shifting your thinking so that it doesn’t overwhelm you.

When I read it a couple of months ago – presumably buying books about midlife crises is among its symptoms – I found plenty to think about. Including the mindblower about facing up to death: why is imagining a world after your death so much more painful than imagining a world before you were born? Continue reading “Protest the future, redeem the present” →

Note to self

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SmallWonders_collage-by-Anna-Patton
Collage, 30 May

I’ve been writing diaries on and off since I was about seven years old. Lately, it’s been more ‘on’ than ever. 

Not just because, under lockdown, there’s fewer distractions of people to meet or places to be, but also because recording stuff feels important right now.

Countless photographers, writers, artists agree – and so do social historians. I feel somehow happier knowing that they’re gathering people’s experiences of living through Covid-19 – for example in this project from the Young Foundation, or this one from London’s Museum of the Home. Universities, archives and historical societies around the world are doing the same, inviting details of the “deeply personal, political, or mundane“, as the US-based ‘Journal of the Plague Year’ project puts it. Ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Continue reading “Note to self” →

New rhythms, new hope

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IMG_8796-a
“The revolution was sustained because of the arts. The graffiti needed no words to be explained… people who have no political background, no idea about the issues in Sudan – they were educated by the songs of the revolution.” – Anda, pictured at Mellow Arts Gallery, which she co-manages. 

Flights to and from Khartoum had been cancelled all day, we heard.

Not because of Covid-19, which was yet to stifle travel in most parts of the world – but because of a sandstorm.

It was a Thursday in early March, and my colleague Julie and I were due to fly back to Europe the following day. Back to Europe meant returning to what felt like the eye of another storm: Italy was by now the tragic centre of the coronavirus outbreak, and the rest of the continent wasn’t far behind. Continue reading “New rhythms, new hope” →