I love you.

You are beautiful.

I know you can do anything.**

• Record this on your phone.
• Listen regularly especially when in doubt, love or trouble.
• Encourage others.

This is just one of the ways we can build the “strength to love,” as Dr Martin Luther King urges in his eponymously titled book. I use this affirmation with my students in order to encourage them to build confidence, self-esteem and become aware of any self-loathing they many carry. It takes confidence to listen to others before speaking one’s own mind and embrace change. It’s easy to be toxic, especially online. It takes guts, however, to resist insulting others who have differing perspectives. It takes tenacity to think twice and NOT respond with greed, anger or stupidity (i.e. to lead a life freer of GAS).

Certainly, those who labour in the classroom have often come to realize that in addition to teaching our subject matter, we’re often teaching people how to become more confident. Nowhere is this more visible than in urban Asia, filled with youth, sandwiched between cultures online, wedged between generations that have steep distinctions. Youth in Asia are regularly assaulted with all the wonders of the world right in their pockets, but confronted with the reality of ‘development’. They’re often to young/inexperienced to recognize that no nation is ‘there’ yet, so they falsely hold up the west as a beacon of hope. I say hold up a mirror to one’s self, with the fierce determination to see nothing but love and acceptance. THAT, my friends, is development.

**Adapted from Lizzo, live at Glastonbury 2019. See here move the crowd here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnIbJi_jWII

Then she has the crowd say: “I love you Lizzo. You are beautiful, girl. And you can do anything, b*tch. Do it on your good days, but especially do it on your bad days ’cause that sh*t is like medicine, man!”