Day 5 (Tuesday 5th December 2017)
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Five British pounds - the face value of the Royal Mint's 2017 commemorative
uncirculated Christmas coin (they are selling for £13). It has been designed
by Edwina Ellis. Last year, The Royal Mint struck the UK's first official Christmas coin,
which was the Christmas Nativity Story £20 fine silver coin. Only 30,000 of these were issued;
it was designed by Bishop Gregory Cameron, who created the design for the last 'round pound'.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the Lydians
were the first people to have used gold and silver coinage,
illustrated on only one side with a lion or other sacred animal.
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Today's post is a treat. It has been written by the extraordinary polymath Hilary Gallo. A precocious and highly intelligent child/adolescent, Hilary commenced his career as a lawyer with a top global firm. He soon realised that for personal satisfaction he needed to do something more creative and so founded his own business - in a way this initial venture reflects his on-going passion for enabling individuals to stand out and shine. He returned to the law within a tech environment, solving problems (something his is good at) prior to stepping into the world of commerce and outsourcing, where he honed his negotiation skills, before jumping ship to become a consultant. Increasingly he found himself focussing on people-related matters. In 2011 he founded Consensum and spends his time on enabling people and helping encourage power without power. He holds retreats for executives looking to change the way they approach work and life, is a trained mediator and runs confidence-building workshops in schools. He is an exceptional writer, speaker and coach. He is a CEDR Accredited Mediator and a Meyler Campbell Executive Coach (accredited by WABC and the SRA) and a Realise2 Accredited Strengths Coach and is also Lumina Spark, Emotion and Leader Accredited. His detailed career history on LinkedIn is here.
Hilary lives in North Hertfordshire in the UK with his family. He loves the outside and is often to be found on water (or helping people who are on it), or walking in the glorious countryside near his home. It is great to have him here as part of this community.
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Sometimes it is OK not to know. Sometimes it can even be
good to be confused and lost for a while. Times of not knowing, of feeling
about in the dark, are a place we have to go through in order to find something
new. 2017 has felt like this to me at many times and in the all too frequent
dark moments I keep reminding myself of this; darkness is only an interim
stage.
In the confusion, some events stand out. One happened this
autumn as I opened our front door to Shelia. Shelia looked me in the eye
resolutely with stiff backed purpose, as she always does, and said “I suppose
you are going to be all difficult this year again?” Stunned and somewhat lost
for words, I simply responded to my near neighbour in our quiet village, “Good
morning Shelia”.
I’d seen her coming down the path for this yearly event and,
as I’d learnt to do over the years, had gone upstairs to get a heavy supply of
change from my bedside table. This meant at least that I was able to respond by
dropping a decent weight of coins into her collecting box whilst I asked how
she was; trying to avoid her tray of poppies.
The year before I had tried to explain to Shelia that I’d
happily give money to the collection but that I’d rather not have any poppies.
I told her that our family didn’t wear them any more as we weren’t so sure
about the tradition of remembrance and its purpose in the modern world.
Knowing Shelia of old I’d trod carefully and we’d had, what
I thought of, as an honest exchange of views. I’d hoped that she’d at least
understood me as I had sought to understand her. Now, I knew that this wasn’t
so. I’d upset her. Also, just like last year, I’d failed in another sense; I
still came away from the encounter with the poppies I no longer wanted.
A few weeks later, on Remembrance Sunday itself, I was
sitting with my daughter, Anna, who is 15 and we started to talk about how she
understood the idea of remembrance and how it had been presented at school. Put
simply she didn’t get it. I explained how I understood it and she was clear. “I
get that” she said “But how is that helping us going forward?” she asked as we
both went on to question the divisive behaviour and the rising levels of
violence in the world that we’d seen in 2017.
With Anna’s question in mind my thoughts went back to
another woman, equally as strong as Shelia but very different. I’d met Mama D
when she’d stood up to lead an exercise at a gathering I’d attended in North
London in the weeks after the Grenfell Tower disaster. The event had been a
coming together of community groups seeking answers to change at the grass-roots level.
The group descended into the very talking we’d promised to
get away from, and Mama D, bursting with energy, had suggested we get up, get
moving and do something physical. Several of us got up with her and followed
her instructions which were to close our eyes and to take ourselves back to the
first dawn on a barren planet, stripped back of anything we knew.
Once we found ourselves fully in that space Mama D encouraged
us to feel the first stirrings of the morning as the sun made the promise of
impending light to us and, as the sun rose, to move physically into possibility
of the new world that was dawning before us and of which we were a part. My
whole body felt warmed through with fresh possibility as I reached forward to
embrace the light of that first dawn.
When we all opened our eyes together all of us went through a surprised and startled moment when we realised that we were all making the basically the same shape. All of us had our hands up, outstretched with our fingers spread in the shape of a tree. Our bodies were open, stretching out for possibility, for light and for connection. This wasn’t just me feeling this; this was a thing we all shared.
When we all opened our eyes together all of us went through a surprised and startled moment when we realised that we were all making the basically the same shape. All of us had our hands up, outstretched with our fingers spread in the shape of a tree. Our bodies were open, stretching out for possibility, for light and for connection. This wasn’t just me feeling this; this was a thing we all shared.
I later learnt that Mama D works with a community
organisation called “Ubele” which is derived from the Swahili for “The Future”.
Ubele is a community-building organisation that seeks to increase the capacity
of the African Diaspora community in the UK to lead and to create their own
social initiatives from the ground up. Tired of waiting for the central or local
government to help people, they are helping those same people to help
themselves.
Moving forward into 2018 I don’t want to repeat my mistake
of unnecessarily upsetting the Shelias of this world or of forgetting the lessons
of the past, but I do think that the ways of seeing that we have, and the framing
narratives we live by unquestioned, do have to be looked at and that not
everyone will always agree. I say this because I don’t believe that fiddling
with the answers we already have will solve the systemic problems the like of
which we saw at Grenfell Tower.
As I gather my thoughts in this traditional period of Advent
my feeling is to be mindful of tradition and of the past but to be
fundamentally where I was with Mama D. on that day. I want to build things
afresh, keen to embrace a new dawn of a new day. In an openly embraced new dawn
we all have the opportunity to be feeling good.
