Agile not Fragile

 When it looked like the 45th President of the United States was going to be successful in his presidential run, back in 2015-16, an African American woman of my acquaintance decided she was getting out of there.

Her family had lived in the United States for generations, and she had lived all her life in a pleasant, bustling mid-sized city, where she had a daughter and an extended family she was close to. Her roots went deep. But she said then she could see what was going to happen. You plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire. There would be rampant racism, and violence and maybe civil war, and the country would be divided on political and racial lines, over the next few years. Anyone wanting peace in the valley had better look for it somewhere over the rainbow. 

She posted her plans on Facebook. Fascinated, I observed her preparations to completely relocate herself and her work and her life to Costa Rica, a place she had once been to on holiday, and liked very much. She is a free-spirited lady, but she set about the process of moving in a systematic, thorough and practical way which was very effective. Visas were applied for, for herself and her daughter, and she looked up a place to rent via the Internet, in a good looking area of the country near a hospital and a shopping centre, a bank and a post office. She saved up the air fare for 18 months, left her house plants with her mother, put her favourite items of furniture in storage, and got on a flight to Costa Rica, just as the 45th President was being sworn in. 

The place she had rented was up on a hill, a bus trip from the centre of town, and the pictures she posted were full of vivid colourful foliage, blue skies and abundant greenery. She had a small balcony where she could sit and have a cup of tea in the morning, and observe the new world she had been brave enough to come to. She started to learn the local language, and explore the cuisine. She enjoyed the cheerfulness and openness of the local people, the relaxed atmosphere, the relatively low crime rate and the resulting lack of a Police presence. And once every week or so she would catch up with the news, to see what was going on back in the United States. She would order pizza, even though they didn’t make it so well in Costa Rica as her local place did, back where she grew up. 

She gradually made her new house a home, with local pottery and glassware and cushions from the markets. She was able to do her work online, with students learning from her via Zoom and Skype, and her relocated professional life flourished. She was one of the best prepared people for the COVID-19 crisis, as her income did not decrease, and her work processes were already in place to allow her to work from home. 

She is a person of bright intelligence, both intellectually (IQ) and emotionally (EQ). And she is very open-minded and adaptable, and does not waste time mourning over things she cannot do anything about. But even her good sense and equanimity have been challenged by the careening chaos of what is happening in the US, leading up to the next election. 

She described her feelings as she saw the protests starting in the cities after the murder of George Floyd, and the responses to the Black Lives Movement, as people started to panic and feel their privilege being ‘shook’, as she said. The pushback would be pretty predictably savage. People should get a hold of themselves and not get triggered. There’d be plenty of people with vested interests trying to stir up enmity. Her view is that this era is a pivotal time of choice, and that she hopes that many people would choose not to get defensive and oversensitive, but to grow up and get educated about the true history of the towns and cities they lived in, and the land they occupied. 

From her balcony chair on her beautiful hill in Costa Rica, she says that freedom of choice is the right of every person. But you have to act on what you believe, not just talk about it. She says, now is the time to be agile, not fragile. It’s a phrase so lovely, she should make it into a quotable quote, a meme, with its own hashtag. I suggest she write her life story as a memoir. She laughs, and says: I say it as I see it! Which is another way of explaining that she holds these truths to be self-evident.