Two Books

Two Books

There is much to be said here. I want to make a few comments on the two authors Haruki Murakami and Stephen Covey.

They are as different as can be and yet both of them speak directly to me in a very meaningful way.

Covey (Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. London: Simon & Schuster, 2004 (1997), simply has helped me to become more aware of my potentials when it comes to my person and how I could develop certain aspects of my daily life. Just to have the basic endowments of a human life put down on paper: imagination, conscience, independent will and self-awareness (page 146). It is great to see these words in writing, as they in a concrete way sum up what it is to be a person.

Many things could be said about his leadership manual. It could be deemed as irretrievably American, as hopelessly grounded in a liberal mindset in the sense of anything is possible if only you put your mind to it. And yet, you have to give a certain lee-way to the freedom of the will, unless you start playing with deterministic views.

Therefore, I cannot stop admiring Covey for what he has achieved in terms of leadership guidance. It should then be said that he also pays equal attention to the need for inter-dependent work. The whole idea of forging a personality with own gifts, abilities and own drive, is linked up with what it is to be human, i.e. to live and work together with others. But the starting point is the individual. Africa may come to the rescue in doing the opposite: start with the group of people, as the only foundation when shaping a human being into a humane, human being. But even the African starting point does in no way make it possible to avoid the need to develop the individual being.

Murakami is meaningful to me for a very particular reason. He is by now a leading novelist in the world, especially when it comes to crime novels. But my indebtedness to him has one, only one reason: his book on running: What I talk about when I talk about running. A Memoir. London: Vintage Books, 2009. To start with, this book seems just outright boring. He tells about running, training for various marathons around the world, especially the New York Marathon and the actual doing the marathon run.

However, a lot of things are intertwined with these rather tedious enumerations of what it is like to train and to actually take part in a competition. What he does is to give a whole picture of his life as an athlete and as a writer. I am simply impressed with his daily programme: run at 7 a.m. for an hour and then sit down writing the whole morning until some time in the afternoon. And he does so, regardless of eventual inspiration or motivation. It is hard work, and it is also about discipline.

There is a certain amount of loneliness about this life style, but he does not dwell on his other side of his personal life and activities, which I appreciate. I don’t read the book in order to get to know everything about this Japanese man. It is quite enough to read about his running, and what goes through his head while running, and also about the creative moment of writing. I have come to read this book, over and over again, and it does not make me tired of it.

An added challenge to me personally is the fact that I probably cannot run any longer in a consistent way due to pain in my right knee; but I can walk, and the idea now is simply to convert everything I used to do as a runner into a walking mode. I am still in the process of getting that into place.

Getting back to Covey. One of the things I like the most in Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, will be found under the rubric “What it takes so say ‘No’” (page 156ff). I wished that more people would give themselves a chance to ponder what he says here; the insight that the very ability to say no, often unleashes a wonderful sense of freedom, not away from everything but into that which had been hidden by that which you yourself and your surrounding had taken for granted that you should, or had an obligation to do. Freedom of the will? Yes, if not there, we would be totally doomed, and hopefully we are not completely doomed, yet.