Edwin's Corner

The extraordinary journey of one woman, and what we risk losing in a world where information is everywhere, but wisdom is becoming increasingly scarce. There are tears that come from sadness. There are tears that come from joy. And then there are tears that carry the weight of a lifetime, because the person shedding them has traveled so far, endured so much, and survived so many versions of themselves that the moment before them seems almost impossible to comprehend. Georgina stood before a crowd of about forty people, mostly family members and a few close friends. Tears were streaming down her face. She had just earned her PhD: a Doctor of Philosophy. Three letters that seemed rather small for the journey they were supposed to represent. As she struggled to compose herself, I wondered how many versions of Georgina had lived and died for the woman standing before us to exist. The little girl who knew hunger intimately. The young woman who had to fight for an education. The teacher who ...

James had been hired for one reason: he was exceptionally good at his work. In fact, that didn’t quite capture it. He was frighteningly good at it. The organization had been seeking someone with a distinctive mix of skills: artificial intelligence, information security, change management, and exceptional communication. On paper, the first two seemed most important, but they were wrong. The last two would determine whether James survived. His assignment sounded simple when it was described in a boardroom. There were nine territories, each run by a largely autonomous leadership team that had been doing things its own way for years. James was expected to persuade them to work together, pool resources, give up practices they had grown comfortable with, and hand over a significant amount of responsibility to a man much younger than most of them. In doing so, he was supposed to achieve what people far more senior than he was had been trying unsuccessfully for almost three years. Time was run...

Paula had been successful for as long as anyone could remember. She had won awards, sat on panels, and been quoted in the papers more often than almost any other woman in the city. Every year brought a new title, and someone was always standing to introduce her as brilliant, driven, and fearless. Sometimes she wondered who they were talking about. Nobody ever called her lonely. Nobody knew, and Paula would not have known how to say it anyway. Her father, Charles, talked about her constantly when he was home. When he wasn’t, he left gifts: bicycles, books, dresses, and toys no one else on the street had. As she got older, the gifts became tennis rackets, watches, holidays, and later the kind of doors that money and influence open without anyone hearing them creak. What Charles could not give was himself. His job moved him to a different continent every few weeks. He once told his wife, Katherine, that he felt like a foreigner in his own skin. He would wake at night, reach across the bed...

Jude could not sleep. The pain had grown beyond anything he could name. It rose from deep within him and spread until he could no longer tell where it began or where he ended. Six months earlier, he had learned the truth. Now that truth had forced him to a decision he could no longer postpone. He could continue lying to himself, or he could face what was happening and let go. But to Jude, letting go felt dangerously close to choosing death. The Man Everyone Consulted For years, Jude had built a successful career as a tax consultant — sought out and respected, exceptional in how he delivered his work, regarded as a thought leader across the region. People called him when the numbers grew complicated, when transactions stalled, when regulators asked uncomfortable questions, or when the tax implications threatened to swallow a deal. He knew how to assess risk. He knew how to hold several possible outcomes in view and advise on what to protect, what to release, and what the long-term conse...

  No one ever explained suffering to Joseph; he simply lived through it. He had grown up in poverty — not the kind that strips away all dignity at once, but the kind people slowly learn to accept. The kind that gets blamed on the government, the rich, bad luck, or the circumstances of the day. In that world, the haves were accused of stinginess, while the have-nots took a strange pride in surviving without them. Joseph’s family lived in the ghetto, but they still had some basic necessities. They had clean water and electricity that, unlike Nairobi’s unpredictable weather, stayed stable and dependable — even though it had been connected illegally. On good days, they ate three meals. But whether a day was good depended on whether his father drank away his earnings. Joseph’s suffering meant going without one meal, then another, as money meant for food disappeared into alcohol. It meant hearing other children laugh because his father had been pulled from a ditch again — sometimes in a ...