Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux by Tom Fletcher

Author:Tom Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-12-21T19:51:34+00:00

1) LOOK FOR KINDNESS

Observing kindness could start with looking for examples of it from history. They are everywhere. Take Sousa Mendes, Portugal’s consul in Bordeaux during the Second World War, who saved the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees and others fleeing the Nazis by issuing travel visas from occupied France. According to his son, ‘He strode out of his bedroom, flung open the door to the chancellery, and announced in a loud voice: “From now on I’m giving everyone visas. There will be no more nationalities, races or religions.”’ Thousands escaped and most sought to cross the Atlantic. Among them were artist Salvador Dalí, filmmaker King Vidor, members of the Rothschild banking family and the majority of Belgium’s future government-in-exile. Mendes was expelled from Portugal’s diplomatic corps and left without a pension.

Harriet Tubman rescued at least three hundred people from slavery in the 1850s. Born a slave and having worked from the age of five, she fled alone in her mid twenties to Pennsylvania, the neighbouring free state, helping to test a new ‘underground railroad’ that was being used by slaves and abolitionist sympathisers to escape. Despite the threat of harsh penalties, she made as many as nineteen trips to rescue other slaves and deliver detailed instructions on how to escape.

In the slums of Kibera on the outskirts of Nairobi, Ernest, a teacher, tells his pupils the story of the old man who sees a child looking for starfish on the beach and carrying those he finds back to the sea. The boy explains that the washed-up starfish will die before the tide returns. ‘But there are tens of thousands of the creatures,’ worries the old man. ‘You won’t make much of a difference.’ The boy picks up another starfish and returns it to the water. ‘It made a difference to that one.’

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