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.