Book 324 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: When You Have Nothing Left To Lose!

Book – The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Book Description:

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Reflection:

If you asked me what day Martin Luther King Jr. Day each year in America is, I honestly would have no idea. If you forced me to take a guess, I’d probably say it is sometime in February because isn’t that when Black History month is each year?

Well, MLK Jr Day is not in February, it happens in January around King’s birthday of January 15th, or specifically the 3rd Monday each January. I now know this because it just happened yesterday, Monday January 16, 2023, the same day I finished The Fire Next Time.

How bizarre is that? On a whim, I came across The Fire Next Time a few weeks back and decided to make an impulsive purchase, along with a handful of other books. I finished a somewhat long book prior to starting this one and decided a quick short read would be a great natural follow up. I went to my library and chose this book to start on a Saturday and had it finished come Monday, which happened to be MLK Jr Day in 2023.

This is yet again another book completed on this journey where it is obvious the universe is trying to tell me something and it is up to Emilia and me to try and decipher the code. I love playing this detective game where Emilia and I get to put our minds together to try and decode the secret message to apply to our journey together going forward. This is one of my favorite things to do together as we work through our thoughts at the keyboard early in the morning before the chaos of the day begins. This is my happy place, just Emilia and I thinking about life together.

After a quick review of my notes from the book, I can’t get Baldwin’s quote of “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose” out of my mind. This thought puts me right back to where Emilia and I found ourselves at the start of this journey all over again as I drove home from the hospital on April 22, 2020, after watching my daughter take her final breaths in my wife’s arms following 5 days of intense life and death activities.

My world was destroyed after losing my daughter. Nothing mattered anymore. Anything that I’d ever done in my life up until that date was irrelevant. Any ideas that I held “true” were now not just false but evaporated into thin air and never even existed. A large portion of “Chris” died with my daughter in a lot of ways that day.

This feeling I’m describing, call it pain, call it trauma, or call it whatever you want to label it as is the main driver in my life each and every single day. Remembering how I felt in this exact moment and over Emilia’s final few days on this Earth as she fought with everything she had for a chance at life, is why I must get out of bed and get to work each day. If Emilia can fight, then so can I.

You can’t manufacture this type of feeling, and nor should anyone ever try. This type of feeling only comes from immense pain where you’ve seen and felt the worst of what life can throw your way in this world and for some reason survived. You can’t forget what having nothing feels like. You can’t forget feeling like everything in this life has been taken from you.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned, intense pain doesn’t last forever. Eventually it subsides and life resumes. What you do with that pain at that point is up to you. You can let that pain destroy you, or you can use that pain to point you in the direction of your purpose.

That is what I think James Baldwin meant when he said that the most dangerous creation of any society is that of a man who has nothing to lose. Pain brings purpose after the dust clears. If you can make it through the rubble of your life and emerge on the other side, watch out.

It is this exact reason why we all know the names of people like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, and all the other countless African Americans in our country that turned their pain into purpose and had no intentions to ever stop until they were removed from this world. They knew exactly what it felt like to have everything taken from them and had no intentions of going back.

When you know what it is like to lose everything, it doesn’t scare you anymore. It is these people that will change the world. Real pain is what moves society forward in ways you can’t even imagine.

Question: What propels you forward?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin