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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 One of the social phenomena that unite most people living in America, similar to the disdain felt for carpenters and tailors in Uganda, is spam calls. Almost everyone living in America receives spam calls from telemarketers hawking all sorts of products. My colleague told me about her friend who’s a pastor. Most people ignore spam calls, but he answers them eagerly and negotiates for protected time for his own agenda. He says, "I'll listen to your pitch after I tell you about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."
Welcome to all the new subscribers! We’ve got a good thing going here. I hope you stay.
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LIFE
Lingo Limits
Wage workers in late-19th-century Germany, feeling the sting of capitalism extracting their labor without offering a safety net, articulated the need for—and formed—unions. They paid money into these unions, which, in turn, covered their healthcare in emergencies. This concept of emergency funds, which had to be articulated first—through language—before being operationalized, would later be appropriated to create the now-indispensable and universal system of social security.
Besides its most basic purpose of facilitating communication, language shows us how little or how much we know.
When considering why some white people create a special category for a Black person who challenges their racial stereotypes instead of abandoning the stereotypes altogether, bell hooks leveraged language to help us understand that racism is emotional and ideological, not just a product of ignorance. Social psychology codified this convenient categorization as subtyping. This language adds another arrow to the quiver in the battle for equality.
During the peak of the HIV epidemic in the ‘80s and ‘90s, fear of infection was rife. But as the science of the disease’s transmission became clearer, our language expanded to give us words like “stigma”—to name our actions and feelings. Language leveraged science to pave the way not only for prevention and health promotion, but also for treating the infected with dignity.
Language necessarily expands by appropriation, as alluded to by Maria Popova:
Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have appropriated the English language — not my native — in order to write these words.
Our imaginations are also constrained by language. Your dreams can only cross over into reality when you can articulate them. Popova says something soberingly beautiful here:
Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of culture. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. Because we live in language, because our very personhood is a narrative creation, even the greatest visionaries can never fully bend their gaze past the event horizon of their culture’s language: its lexicon and parlance, its idioms and metaphors.
Language can limit us or expand us.
It limits us because you can’t solve a problem you’re not willing to have, let alone name; but it expands us because we always, via appropriation, create new language that allows us to bend our imagination, and then our reality.
So, to appropriate the old saying, sticks and stones can break your bones, and words can make or break you.
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THINGS
A quote
Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you’ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?
[…]
No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler… Or it hovers behind him… In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave — where childhood and death, in one another’s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.
A picture
While in St. Louis a couple of months ago, I reconnected with an old college friend. In college, I had never met anyone so crippled by self-doubt yet full of determination. Kayle often complained about life and school but still took test after test and risk after risk. She didn’t follow a traditional path, and it wasn’t always pretty, but in the past three months, she accomplished two things her younger self thought she never would: 1) She married her high school sweetheart and 2) She became a pediatric emergency physician.
She covered all my meals in St. Louis with her fat paycheck.
WORK
One one condition
You have the data below and you want to use color to gauge project status at a glance. Conditional formatting is your friend.
Find it
Select the cell(s) you want to format and click “Conditional formatting”:
Create your rules in the menu on the right:
Explore. The options are endless.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> A catalog of colors and why they were named what they were named
> How Egypt’s Great Pyramid were designed to survive earthquakes
> You can turn an old Android phone into a WiFi extender for your home
Have a great weekend,
— SO
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