What's the best piece of advice you've received from a friend?

I'm three. A lot of things going on until then. Growing. Sucking. Shitting. All those nappies. Then there was crawling, that was good. Walking, scary! But my brother Michael told me the secret.


Well, I don't know for sure that I was three when Michael told me this, but I'm certain he did at some point, probably when I was pretending to be a tight-rope walker along the top of a narrow wall in one of my mother's building projects..

It's a beautiful suggestion, and has come back to me again and again in various forms.

(attributed to many, from Alan Watts to Zen Master Lin Chi to Lao Tzu. And one of my own teachers Paul Lowe, added the following slant: "Dead is one thing, alive is the other, it is the middle that is the most uncomfortable." )



Back to my brother Michael. That's who I want to write about, he's who I thought of when I saw this Question from Zaadz.  He's commonly known as Mike Jensen.


Right at this very moment he is in Liberia helping  Africa's first woman president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf come up with a strategy to use the internet to accelerate Liberia's reconstruction and development.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is the first elected black woman head of state in the world. There is LOTS going on in Liberia right now.. until yesterday I didn't even know where it was. (I often think Sierra Leone is somewhere in the mid-west of the U.S. It was Michael who suggested i was getting it mixed up with the spaghetti western movies of Sergio Leone. He's right, of course...)



It is because of Michael that I'm here on Zaadz. He introduced me to email when I was 18. That's well over 20 years ago. It is because of him I'm not scared of technology, that I experience it almost as part of myself.

He's not an Apple user (harumph!) but then the way he uses his computer he doesn't need a helpful or pretty operating system- he can use anything at all, just so long as  he can get into the system, which he always can -  in a way most of us don't even know is possible ( or don't even want to know is possible...)

I'm obviously very proud of Michael - he's one of those people who work largely in the background, is uninterested in money or fame, and yet could easily have had both. He is enormously instrumental in the progress of wiring up Africa - from the ground up. He works as an independent consultant, assisting in the establishment of information and communications systems in developing countries. He makes frequent arduous flights all over the world to share his vision and his extensive knowledge and experience.  He's written speeches for Nelson Mandela and other governmental heads, he is a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the International library Initiatives in Botswana - a project that is making libraries and the internet more available to everyone the country. But mostly, Michael is tirelessly available for everyone who needs his skills. 





Thank you Michael, for everything, including the don't wobble bit. I do wobble. I'm a wobbler I'm afraid, but I do look ahead, and from you I learn two more things: to be calm in the face of great stress, and never to judge another.

And for those of you interested in some of his work in communications and  technology: