All Over the Map

I wasn’t expecting how personal it would feel to watch the documentary  MISSION: JOY – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times   on Netflix.  Watching this film about the friendship between the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it felt as if two big pieces of my life were coming together.  Like everyone else, I wouldn’t be who I am were it not for my history, my DNA, my having been born and growing up where I did  -- which in my case, was in South Africa during Apartheid.   I wouldn’t be who I am were it not for my mother, who was sick for so much of my childhood, but so passionate about so many things when she was well, like art and reading and making meringue castles for our neighborhood parties. Or my father, who was so funny and generous and brave, yet never quite shook the impacts that growing up poor and fatherless left him with.  Nor would I be who I am if it weren’t for my brother, who was born when I was four years old, turning me into a bossy and protective big sis