This morning I speak to my daughter, on her way back from visiting a friend at university and returning to work with asylum seeking refugees in London. She is trying to find her way through the body-wrenching transition not of coming away from calmer waters back to the storm of our current human injustice on the front line of the migration and refugee crisis; but the reverse:  trying to process having spent time in an environment where the issues she works with every day, front and centre, filling her heart and mind, are, for almost all the people in that world, simply. not. an. issue.

My question to myself: how do we sustain those people on the front line of injustice, working independently and voluntarily, sustaining themselves not through a regular salary but through piece work in bars, with the indigestable emotional truth that we as humans are able to disconnect ourselves entirely from injustice. How do we enable her to become bilingual enough to cope with that division, whilst speaking and taking comfort from her mother tongue of facing, knowing and wrestling injustice?

I have so many questions in my head about what we need to do that I'm going to try and ask them, both to get them out of my head and look at them, and also ask for any suggestions. A sort of crowdsourced intelligence. So.

Starting a masters research programme today. I look around at hundreds and hundreds of students, across all disciplines, arriving with vigour and hope and a hunger for knowledge.


My question for the day: how do we ensure these three vital signs are fed, encouraged and enabled to point at the existential crises we face today before getting sucked into the crushing need to prove existence not by the creation of better for all of us, but by the accumulation of more for ourself?