Edwin's Corner

  When Ordinary Days Become History There are certain news stories I no longer read the way I used to. No, I’ve not become indifferent. Quite the opposite. I’ve learned that headlines are astonishingly poor historians. “Six people killed in tragic road accident.” “Driver loses control.” We read the stories during breakfast, exchange sympathetic looks, and maybe say softly, “ That’s so sad.” Afterwards, we go on with our day. The headline doesn’t mention that someone packed an extra sweater because mothers expect you’ll feel cold, or that an uncle brought a cooler no one requested, or that two cousins argued over the window seat as if it were a matter of national diplomacy. Headlines report events. Life happens in the details. This story lives in the details.  —  Three families had escaped Nairobi for a long weekend in Naivasha. Nothing luxurious. Just a few days away from meetings that should have been emails, traffic that seemed personally offended by your existence, and WhatsApp...

  What happens when yesterday’s protection enters today’s relationships Drew had been standing in the prison queue for hours. He was in a country he barely knew, waiting to see a brother he had not seen in five years. For three of those years, the family had not even known where Stalin was. Then came the phone call. Prison. A foreign country. His wife was dead. Stalin had killed her. There are pieces of family news for which nobody has prepared the correct response. For almost a year, Drew and his siblings had tried everything they could think of: lawyers, relatives, consular channels, friends of friends, anyone who might help them understand what had happened. Eventually, permission was granted for Drew to visit. He had saved for months for the journey. Now he sat in a large visiting hall waiting for his younger brother. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Then a man appeared at the other end of the room. Drew stared. Stalin had always been tall and handsome. The family had been r...

  What happens when your nervous system concludes before you do One of the harder things to accept is that your response to a situation is sometimes less than exemplary. Cathy had one of those mornings. It was only 9:30 a.m., which felt unfair. If your day is going to unravel, it should at least have the courtesy to wait until after lunch. A colleague had raised an issue about her work in front of several senior people. Worse, some of what he shared had come from conversations Cathy believed were private. She tried to explain herself. Her voice quivered at first, then rose as she spoke. Her boss frowned. Someone at the other end of the table seemed to smirk. Another colleague raised an eyebrow. There are moments when an eyebrow is simply an eyebrow. This wasn’t one of them, at least not to Cathy. She saw judgment. Betrayal. Disappointment. Perhaps even the beginning of the end. She defended herself, but she also acknowledged where she had gone wrong and agreed to rectify it. If you...

  Sometimes the beliefs shaping an adult life begin in moments so small that everyone else forgets them. She still remembers the price of the sweets. It was seventy shillings. Not because seventy shillings was a fortune. Not because the sweets themselves were remarkable. She remembers because she never received them. She was six. It was her birthday, and she wanted what six-year-olds usually want — to bring something small to school and share it with her classmates. A bag of sweets. A small celebration. The glorious privilege of being temporarily important because it happened to be her birthday. She asked. The answer was no. On its own, that is hardly the kind of event from which we expect an adult life to emerge. No dramatic soundtrack. No great family crisis. Just a child, a birthday, and a bag of sweets. Yet decades later, during a live coaching conversation in The Clarity Room™, the memory returned. And seventy shillings was no longer only about sweets. It was about asking. The...

Some of the beliefs running our adult lives were formed long before we knew we were forming beliefs. There is something peculiar about being an adult. You can be forty years old, hold a job, raise children, run a business, pay taxes, and possess several passwords you can no longer remember — and still find yourself reacting to something with the emotional logic of a much younger version of yourself. Someone criticizes your work. You know it’s feedback, but your body hears rejection. Someone doesn’t return your call, and although your rational mind knows they’re probably in a matatu somewhere with terrible reception, something quieter says, People always leave. Your spouse asks what you need, and you say, “Nothing” — not because you need nothing, but because you got very good, a long time ago, at needing nothing. Some of our strangest adult behavior begins there, not only with what is happening now, but with what happened then. The Questions We Didn’t Know We Were Asking Children are r...