Note #51: New name

Responsibility, right, rat

What’s up?

I had great calls with those who took me up and booked last week! It was a lot of fun getting to know some of the folk who read these weekly letters and essays and I appreciate you all!

As we enter into a new year of these weekly essays I’ve been thinking about a couple new changes. I’ve decided to change the name from Friday Flow to Doc Ayomide Letters: On Being Human. Mainly, it’s to bring everything together under Being Human, which is not only the name of my website but the question at the heart of my writing: what does it mean to be human?

And to my mind, the 50th was the last of a first collection of letters, and this is the start of a new one. But I don’t think I want to put that in the title just yet. :) What do you think?

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Right and wrong (essay)

This week, I wrote about morality. Yeah I know, pretty heavy. I’d like to know if you find it heavy, though, because I tried to keep it grounded as well, so do let me know how you find it. In it I talk about two ways we can think about responsibility and how that affects our humanity.

Here’s how it opens:

One of my most active WhatsApp groups is for discussing stories.

We talk about all kinds of stories: novels (especially fantasy), anime, movies and TV (especially fantasy and superhero tales), comics, you name it. And we talk about all sorts of things, including the most recurring question in story discussions worldwide: whether a character was wrong or right. I particularly find these interesting because they end up really being not about the stories but about ourselves.

When we’re discussing who’s right or wrong, we’re really voicing our own moral viewpoints.…

You can read the rest of the essay here: Responsibility as a line or path

And here’s a great quote from my collection that is perfect for this week’s essay:

“Who do you think you are?” (addendum)

And speaking of essays, I found this video that I added to last week’s essay because it was just fitting. It’s a beautiful reflection on names and naming, especially in the Yoruba culture of my ancestors. Check it out:

Snake and rat (proverb)

One of my conversations with a reader this week was with the delightful Joy (yes, my namesake of sorts!) who is also Yoruba and shared some delightful proverbs with me. This week’s proverb is one of them:

Just as there is wisdom is the house of the snake, so there is in that of the rat.

On one level, the point here is there’s no monopoly on intelligence: the prey is as motivated to stay alive as the predator is to feed. And so on a second level it’s also making the point that we do well to not underestimate anyone’s intellectual faculties.

Talk soon,

Doc Ayomide

PS. The Being Human website and the weekly Doc Ayomide Letters are both completely free, but if you’d like to buy me a coffee—or more!—you can use the button below.