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People Travel

Ubuntu

car_ditchThere’s an African ethic know as ubuntu, which holds that our common humanity derives from what we share. No person is an island.

“In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said, describing ubuntu. “A person is a person through other persons.”

I experienced ubuntu firsthand on Saturday, after our Toyota Yaris became stuck in a drainage ditch while my girlfriend and I were en route to the Drakensberg mountains that line the border between South Africa and Lesotho.

The mishap occurred as I reversed the Yaris on a narrow dirt road and failed to see the ditch in time. Luckily for us, the car lodged on the ditch’s rim, which held the vehicle in place. Otherwise the vehicle could have overturned with us in it.

As we stepped out of the car and contemplated calling a tow truck, we resigned ourselves to our plans for the sunny, 70-degree day being upended by the accident. Just then, a car arrived and three Zulu guys jumped out.

They didn’t ask whether we needed help.

Instead, they sized up the situation without our having to explain anything and then filed into the ditch with the goal of pushing the car up and over the edge.

About then a second car appeared and then a third, and out poured the passengers of both vehicles. In all, we had six men ready to lend their strength to the effort. An Indian man arrived in his pickup truck. The group hatched a plan that the truck would tow while the rest of us pushed.

In what seemed like five minutes, the car was back on the road. Though the men did not ask for anything in return for their aid, I offered them some bottles of water that we had in an ice chest in the trunk.

In that instant, nine people on a road in rural South Africa came together in a community.

Ubuntu.

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Life

Embracing chance…

I recently heard a talk that changed how I think about the world.

The talk was by Kevin Slavin, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, who chronicles the history and future of luck and has a message about the role of chance in our lives and society.

“It’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance, or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault, and that this is the essential narrative of our time,” says Slavin. “The myth that we live in is that you don’t just get what you get, you get what you deserve.”

“There’s so little luck left in the world,” he adds.

In the talk, Slavin chronicles how we’ve made chance the enemy despite irrationality’s surrounding us.

Chance has been a part of the games we humans play since the earliest times, according to Slavin, who observes that for most of human history we’ve been playing games, which come from dice.

“The impulse to play games is anything but trivial,” he says. “What we’re doing when we hold dice in our hand is something that’s actually unpredictable.”

Yet as Slavin shows, we inhabit a culture of control and live in an age when the prevailing belief is that life is meritocratic, that problems will yield to analysis of so-called big data and that all we have to do to get ahead is, as one best-selling book advises, to lean in.

Slavin asks what might happen if we praised luck instead of burying it. “There’s a pleasure and a value in not knowing what the future will bring,” he concludes, “and a truth in not pretending and to simply face forward and say, ‘Bring it.’”

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Asides Favorite Places

Hacking Paris

paris copyOn Halloween my girlfriend and I made up our faces to resemble the walking dead and set out for the Tour Eiffel. After walking along the Seine and under the tower we headed to the Champ de Mars, the long green mall that lies immediately to the tower’s southeast.

Someone had removed a section of a black metal fence that cordoned off the green. About 20 people had entered through the opening. Once inside they clustered on the lawn, sitting on blankets in groups of two or three. Someone dribbled a soccer ball. A guy selling wine and champagne by the bottle made the rounds.

We entered, found a soft patch of grass, and unpacked a baguette, some aged Gouda and a bottle of Cotes de Rhone that we had in our backpack. We opened the wine and toasted a lovely night, with the tower looming over our right shoulders, illuminated in amber and flashing thousands of sparkly lights.

About four-fifths of our way through the wine, a police officer approached. At first we thought he was busting us for drinking in public. But we realized he was shooing us off the lawn. Other police had fanned out and were doing the same to the others.

Of course we complied. We gathered our things, headed out and continued to walk along the gravel pathway that lines the green.

Later I realized that together with the other merrymakers we had hacked the city. We conformed a public space to one that accommodated us.

We who use cities confront similar challenges daily. How does your city feel? How would you like to engage with it?

Street skaters hack their environment. Citizens are using publicly available data and computer code to solve challenges relevant to their neighborhoods. Pedestrians forge pathways in parks regardless of whether the park’s planner placed a path in that spot.

At PopTech in October I heard Helen Marriage, co-director of the London-based design firm, Artichoke, talk about the large-scale urban spectacles she produces. “A city isn’t just for toil, trade and traffic, it exists for people,” said Marriage. “The rules of our cities are not somebody else’s rules – they’re our rules, and we can change them, briefly, or forever.”

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Favorite Places

The life aquatic

I went swimming recently at the Asphalt Green community center in Manhattan’s Battery Park City. The pool, which has six lanes that extend for 25 yards, opened in June. The depth runs from 3’ 6” at one end to nine feet at the other.

The pool is part of a 52,000-square-foot facility that includes a fitness area, locker rooms and basketball courts. The building, which occupies three levels, has earned a LEED gold-level certification for environmental friendliness.

Swimmers can leave the locker rooms and walk directly into the pool area.

The pool feels wonderful. Lanes are marked by green lines on the bottom and divided by blue and green dividers. While swimming, I loved looking at the pool’s bottom, which has none of the grime that can build up between tiles. The walls felt great on flip turns. The water was crystal clear.

After my swim and a shower, I thanked the people at the front desk, headed into the sunshine, boarded a Citi Bike and pedaled along Hudson River Park. The ride took me past Tribeca and the West Village and the new Whitney Museum that’s under construction

Categories
Life

Why I ordered a Tikker

I recently contributed $39 for an online campaign to build a digital watch that counts down the seconds you have left to life.

The device, known as Tikker, is the creation of a Fredrik Colting, a Swede who works in publishing and who found himself confronting the prospect of death after his grandfather passed away. “I realized that nothing matters when you are dead,” Colting told Fast Company. “The only thing that matters is what we do when we are alive.”

The Tikker draws on such information as your age, body mass index and where you live to determine your life expectancy. (Unclear whether the Tikker factors in the ages of one’s parents and grandparents.) The Tikker also tells time.

Apparently Tikker’s fundraising push resonated. In just over a month the startup raised more than $98,000 or nearly four times its goal.

I’ve wondered why I pre-ordered the Tikker. I know intellectually that my days are numbered and that my life could end at any moment. You don’t have to wait for the Tikker to obtain a guess as to your life expectancy. I am expected to live for 78 years and to die on Friday, April 5, 2041, according to the Digital Death Clock, an online site that will give you similar information.

I don’t even wear a wristwatch.

Maybe it’s my journey this year, having stepped out of America and decided to live awhile in Africa. Maybe my support for the Tikker comes with my being in a profoundly different culture, or having to make my way as a freelancer or to figure out what problems to work on. Some days I feel as if I launched from a skateboard ramp into mid-air.

That’s to say there’s urgency. I have to do everything as soon as possible because there’s little time. I would like to meet everyone whom I hope to meet and to ask as many questions as I can ask and to write as many words as possible and to do all that as soon as I can because I don’t know and you don’t know how much time we have left in this life that we’re all passing through.

There are many things to do and to make and to discover. By putting the date of our death on our wrists, the Tikker aims to spur us to appreciate the life we’re living. That’s a Kickstarter for me.

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Favorite Places

Halloween in Paris

bee_halloweenCompared with New York, Halloween in Paris seems serene. On the metro we saw a girl with silver hair and a grey face. A few benches away sat a man who wore a bloody hockey mask, a la the Friday the 13th films. But you might miss them, too.

New Yorkers celebrate Halloween riotously with a parade through the West Village. The subways fill with ghouls and witches and, maybe this year, Anthony Weiner lookalikes.

No parade for Paris though some have called for one. Some trick-or-treaters came out. Mostly the city’s lights beckoned the undead and looked lovely as always.

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Travel

The best lobster role ever?

red's_eatsImagine an entire lobster shucked, buttered and wrapped in a roll. That’s the lobster roll at Red’s Eats, a seafood shack along U.S. 1 in Wiscasset, Maine that we visited Tuesday while en route to the PopTech conference in Camden.

I am hardly a lobster roll connoisseur, but even I could tell that the one at Red’s is perfection. No mayo on that roll, which is simply meat.

That I even know this stems from some good fortune. Red’s is open every day from April through Columbus Day. A series of sunny days along the coast this fall persuaded the owners to keep the joint open until Tuesday.

In a typical season Red’s runs through about 10 tons of lobster, according to the owners, who told us that on summer days people queue for up to two hours. The traffic tie-ups that ensue have prompted the town to consider spending $100 million to build a bypass. Some locals have called for moving Red’s.

Businesspeople take note. A sign on the Red’s rear door tells its secret: “And to all of you, our customers, we owe our success.”

Still, Red’s has its skeptics. Sprague’s Lobster, a shack that sits about an eighth of a mile north of Red’s is “a better bet for everything than Red’s,” writes Christina Tree of the Boston Globe in “Maine: An Explorer’s Guide.” I’m unable to assess Tree’s take. Sprague’s already had closed for the season by the time we drove by.

As suits a finale, Red’s was down to its last claws. The owners had sold out of clams, fries and nearly everything else. Happily for me they still had enough homemade Oreo ice cream for a giant scoop

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People

Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom

purple mandelaI recently read “Long Walk to Freedom,” Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. Besides being an amazing tale of one of the world’s great leaders, Mandela’s account of the development of his political consciousness fascinated me.

Throughout, Mandela writes about lessons learned in the politics of the anti-apartheid movement. The story he tells is, of course, one of struggle and ultimately triumph, but it’s also a story about politics. While reading I bookmarked some of Mandela’s descriptions of life under apartheid, his childhood and his outlook.

Here’s Mandela, who practiced law in Johannesburg, describing life for black South Africans under apartheid:

Africans were desperate for legal help in government buildings: it was a crime to walk through a Whites Only door, a crime to ride a Whites Only bus, a crime to use a Whites Only drinking fountain, a crime to walk on a Whites Only beach, a crime to be on the streets past eleven, a crime not to have a pass book and a crime to have the wrong signature in that book, a crime to be unemployed and a crime to be employed in the wrong place, a crime to live in certain places and a crime to have no place to live.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted on charges of sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government. In the following passage he discusses his incarceration.

Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity. In and of itself, that assured I would survive, for any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price or under any pressure.

Mandela goes on to discuss the hopefulness that enabled him to survive his incarceration.

I never seriously considered the possibility that I would not emerge from prison one day. I never thought that a life sentence truly meant life and that I would die behind bars. Perhaps I was denying this prospect because it was too unpleasant to contemplate. But I always knew that someday I would once again feel the grass under my feet and walk in the sunshine as a free man.

Mandela’s father died when Nelson was a boy. Jongintaba, a Xhosa chief whom Mandela’s father had befriended, offered to become Nelson’s guardian. Mandela was sent to live with Jongintaba’s family at the Great Place in Mqhekezweni, the provisional capital of Thembuland. Tribal meetings that Mandela attended at the Great Place provided him with lessons in leadership, including the following:

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.

In the book’s penultimate paragraph, Mandela writes of the challenge ahead for his nation.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

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Travel

Identity

foreignerLast Monday, I stopped by a factory in Pietermaritzburg that sells gardening boots. Leanne, one of the nice people who work there, helped me to find a pair in my size.

“Where are you from,” she asked as we chatted.

“I’m from New York,” I answered. “How did you know I’m not from here?”

“It’s your accent,” said Leeann.

My accent. Yes.

Leeann’s question resonated with me because it reminded me of my being perceived by others in KwaZulu-Natal as a foreigner, which, of course, I am here.

As it happens, the Torah last week told a story about identity. In the story, God gives Abraham and Sarah new identities, as part of God’s promise to make Abraham the leader of a great nation. Abraham’s new name reflected his new status.

Identity is with us always. Shakespeare uses mistaken identity in such plays as Cymbeline, the Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night to create confusion and comic effect.

Around the Shabbat table on Friday, some friends and I discussed identity. What is our identity? Where does it come from?

“I was such a different person in high school,” said Kate, one of our hosts.

On Thursday, I visited a coffee bar in Durban. The manager, a Durbanite named Zane, asked me where I am from. “I’m from New York,” I said, enjoying answering the question for the second time in four days.

“Ah, yes, that’s it, I can tell by your accent,” Zane said.

For me this week, foreigner feels right.

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Travel

The Mandela capture site

mandela sculpture at capture siteOn August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was driving to Johannesburg from Durban when he was stopped by the police in Howick, about 20 miles northwest of Pietermaritzburg.

For Mandela, who had gone underground rather than surrender to the apartheid government that had issued a warrant for his arrest, the encounter set in motion events that led to 27 years of imprisonment. Mandela’s companion that day was Cecil Williams, a theater director and political activist who had helped Mandela move through the country without detection.

“Suddenly, in front of us, the Ford was signaling us to stop. I knew in that instant that my life on the run was over; my seventeen months of “freedom” were about to end,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography. Here’s how Mandela describes the encounter:

When our car stopped, a tall slender man with a stern expression on his face came directly over to the window on the passenger side. He was unshaven and it appeared that he had not slept in quite a while. I immediately assumed he had been waiting for us for several days. In a calm voice, he introduced himself as Sergeant Vorster of the Pietermaritzburg police and produced an arrest warrant. He asked me to identify myself. I told him my name was David Motsamayi. He nodded, and then, in a very proper way, he asked me a few questions about where I had been and where I was going. I parried these questions without giving him much information. He seemed a bit irritated and then, he said, “Ag, you’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams, and you are under arrest!”

On Saturday, I visited the Mandela capture site, which is marked by a sculpture that consists of 50 steel columns between 21 and 31 feet tall. When viewed at a distance of about 114 feet, the columns form a flat portrait of Mandela.

The sculpture, by the South African artist Marco Cianfanelli, was dedicated last year on the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest.

Beside a plaque that marks the actual spot of the arrest, people have left candles, notes and other tokens of their affection along with wishes that Mandela, who turned 95 in July and who reportedly is recovering at home in Johannesburg from a lung infection, might regain his health.