Tuesday, January 4, 2011
No 3: The Art of Smart
One of the things I love most about Audrey Hepburn is her intelligence.
Watching or reading interviews, it is clear she was an articulate, informed woman. And the jobs she did, she did well. Audrey Hepburn, working for UNICEF, knew her stuff inside out: she thoroughly researched the places she visited to understand the how and whys of the heartaches she saw. Her son's memoir, An Elegant Spirit, contains one of the speeches she wrote in her UNICEF years. It's beautifully written and informative - well worth a read.
The interviews and speeches she gave for UNICEF also reveal her personality. She was never aggressive in making her point; she was gentle and hearfelt, and I think that made her pleas all the more effective. One clip, where she's talking about Somalia, you can see her fighting back tears before finally brushing one off her face. In another, she made the comment, "These are not natural disasters but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man-made solution: peace."
She came with the facts and figures imbedded in her mind after hours of research and combined this with her instinctive compassion. What a combination! Audrey Hepburn could carry - heck, she could lead - a conversation about the situation in Somalia while showing genuine concern for the suffering and I think this combination of awareness and compassion is why she reached so many people during her UNICEF years.
I'm trying to up my Hepburn-factor by being more informed and more caring. It is important to know what is happening in the world around us so we can understand not only how lucky we really are (gratitude was an art Ms Hepburn was well-trained in) but also what we can do to help. As Ms Hepburn said:
"Since the world existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing."
So let's make Audrey Hepburn smile and become compassionately informed.
It doesn't matter how we start - reading the newspaper each day, following UNICEF on twitter - as long as we start. And we keep at it.
(Audrey Hepburn could also speak several languages and randomly quote Tagore but I figure we're all multi-lingual people with an encyclopedic knowledge of literature so I didn't bother going into this.)
Labels:
audrey hepburn,
unicef
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