Let’s toast fiction!
By Barbara Soalheiro — Column “Toast to Leadership”, published in Fast Company Brasil
April 21th, 2021
It hasn’t been easy to raise our glasses lately. When I launched this column last month, I knew it was risky to use such an optimistic format in Brazil in this year of 2021. So, I ask for the help of my closest friends at this trying hour.
Raise your glasses: I’d like to make a toast to fiction books!
I begin with a personal story, such as the best toasts call for. I grew up with parents that allowed us to read whatever we wanted, without boundaries. Every Friday, we’d go to Status, a bookstore at Savassi and had a blast there. My older brother would buy magazines (he’s directly responsible for my becoming a journalist) and I would buy cheap literature books for teens, in which the hero was always a girl with red hair and freckles. Maybe not all of them were but that’s what I saw in my imagination. Red hair, freckles, brave, on a mission. I really wanted to have a friend like that girl! One day, I arrived at my ballet lesson and bumped into Fernanda. She had red hair, freckles, was brave and had a natural flair for attracting everyone’s attention. After a short while I was sure about it and I wrote her a letter stating, “you are my best friend”. Fernanda says she didn’t get it at the time, because we barely knew each other, but she thought it was nice of me. We were neighbors so we began to play together. I was 11 and she was 10, we lived about 10 blocks from each other and got on really well. We were the only girls in families with two brothers each. We did well at school and enjoyed all kinds of challenges. We became best friends and for the past 30 years we’ve played an important role in each other’s lives.
When we imagine something, we are capable of realizing it.
I believe this is one of the best skills we can put in practice at the moment. We need to create fiction. The world as we knew it is no longer. Even the most skeptical people already know that nothing will be the same around us. That’s good. Life is movement, things are transformed, cycles do exist, and the journey of life-death-life is the one certainty we’ve got. In the 80s, when I grew up with parents that admired those able to do big things, always and constantly bigger, the idea was that we could be able to decrease inequalities. Those that had more would be able to distribute more. Now we know this project needs changes. We still don’t know how to balance different human truths with a system that produces more equality (I am in favor of a way that entails high distribution and high individual responsibility), but the idea that there are no robust improvements needed has been left behind.
Now we need to imagine.
And in order to imagine we need our truest desires. Once, I interviewed Fernando Gabeira for the Superinteressante magazine and he told me: “The government needs to treat people as they are. And not as it would like them to be.” That’s true for the government as well as for every leadership in all areas.
Our lives, our minds, our feelings are not always full of virtue. I know that we all would like to be better than we really are. We create Paradise, Angels, enlightened and perfect beings. That’s all good. But we are also Hell, demons and the shadows we imagine. This ambivalence is inside each one of us, all the time, the whole life, every second of it.
In literature, we can see that clearly. There are no real characters that do not show us human depths.
I raise my glass to ask you to read a work of fiction. In the next 4 weeks, put aside the management books, the ones that bring formulas and venture yourself in your moral labyrinths (if I may suggest, try Crime and Punishment and Torto Arado). When we look in the mirror, it is easier to take on board responsibilities, individually and collectively. And as such it becomes easier to fulfill the our mission of imagining and realizing.
