Today I have lots to share but not much to say because I’m exhausted! I’ve had a very active past few days - I was invited to Northwestern University to give a keynote speech, in honor of the renaming of the African American Studies department to the Black Studies department. It was such a beautiful day that I was deeply honored to take part in, a day filled with activating discussions about the future of Black studies, liberation, and diaspora.
My talk was on what it means to be “carefree” in an unfree world, something I’m constantly thinking about. I mean, I wrote a whole book about carefreeness, but there’s still much to explore.
I spoke about the relationship between carefreeness and freedom, and how the practice of carefreeness allows us to do the very serious work of freedom. I was really emotional during the talk. Right before I went up, this video of Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” was projected onto the screen. I’d chosen this song to be my intro, forgetting the fact that every time I hear these lyrics I lose my shit:
I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish I could do all the things that I can do
Though I'm way overdue, I'd be starting anew
The song has so much longing, so much grief, but so much hope, too. It’s just such a pure expression of the human condition and of course, when I went up to speak, my Cancer Rising ass got teary. Briefly, I worried that my emotion might be embarrassing but the thought disappeared almost as soon as it arrived. These days I’m really honing in on the fact that part of my purpose is to be a publicly feeling person, to normalize deep and overwhelming emotion, to model the necessity to be able to feel, freely and openly.