Invictus: The Poetry of a Pandemic

"...It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll,  I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."

Invictus, by William Ernest Henley

In January of this year, just 3 months, and also a lifetime ago, I spent an incredible week in South Africa as part of an Aspen Institute fellowship program and had the opportunity to visit Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held prisoner for nearly two decades.

During his ordeal, Mandela famously relied on Henley’s 1875 poem, “Invictus” to keep his hope alive, to remain resilient in the face of oppression, to maintain courage in the face of fear. As Mandela himself noted, “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Three months ago, even two months ago perhaps, hope, resilience, and courage were not the words of our daily lexicon; yet they have become so as we individually and collectively, personally and professionally, grapple with the challenges of an invisible and lethal adversary in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we’ve said many times over the past months, we are living in extraordinary and unprecedented times.

Our lives, our way of working, our day-to-day routines, our ability to interact with our friends and loved ones have all been fundamentally altered. Yet it is during such challenging times, that we define ourselves by hope, by courage, by resilience: as parents, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters, as friends, as colleagues, as neighbors, as teammates, as leaders. That we define ourselves by the small acts of kindness, of compassion, of connection that will enable us to get through this difficult time and come out stronger, together. These small acts of will are choices made – often while suppressing our own very human fears and anxieties and sorrows – that indeed define us, in Henley’s words, as “master of our fate” and “captain of our soul.” 

I grew up with a love of poetry; my mother, who received her PhD in English Literature from Columbia University was an English professor at Bryn Mawr College. My father was a high-school drop-out who saved enough money during his service in Vietnam to put himself through Pennsylvania Military College and eventually through Bryn Mawr for an advanced degree. Mom was his Professor; as family lore goes, he fell in love with her over Milton's Paradise Lost. Without going into any further detail on an arguably unconventional courtship, the household I was raised in was one of literature and poetry, and I grew up memorizing Coleridge, Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, Yeats, and many others.

Poetry has always served as a haven in the storm for me, never more so than in the past several months. 

If you had asked me in November what I was looking forward to at work in 2020, I would have told you that I was excited about the prospect of fully operationalizing the Cybersecurity Fusion Center, an organization my team and I collectively built to understand, detect, and respond to cyber threats to the Firm and our clients. It was a three-year journey that began when I joined Morgan Stanley in February 2017 after nearly three decades in government service.

My last job in government was in the Counterterrorism directorate on the National Security Council Staff at the White House, an experience that was both incredibly rewarding and incredibly demanding, and one that reinforced in me the power of imagination. In many ways, 9-11, the event that continued to loom large in our collective memories, was the story of a failure of imagination, and a cautionary tale of how governments must confront threats to security, in whatever form or fashion such threats may manifest. 

We must remember that while history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme.

And in that context was born the concept of the Fusion Resilience Center, an expansion of the Cyber Fusion Center "to ensure preparedness and response to any business-disrupting event from cyber and fraud, to technology incidents, natural disasters, geopolitical unrest, and such low probability but high-impact events as terrorist attacks and pandemics." That was language from my welcome message to the Global Fusion team on 13 December 2019.

Little did we know what the ensuing months would bring as we were thrust into a role in helping to manage our response to the COVID-19 crisis, in many ways an experience just as demanding as my White House tour, but also equally rewarding...with many unexpected silver linings.

And now here we are in April, what T.S. Eliot called the “cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” And indeed, it has been a cruel month, with the number of infections and deaths skyrocketing around the country, along with the numbers of unemployed as businesses and whole industries shut down.

And yet. And yet.

Even among the death and sadness, there are stories of hope, of generosity, of sacrifice, of bravery, of music, of poetry, of dance, of the enduring resilience of the human spirit. We read them every day; we live them every day in our small – but enormous – conscious acts of kindness.

So even as we think about how this experience will change us -- and we must do that – thinking of the lessons we are learning to make us more resilient, the opportunities that are emerging to make us more productive, indeed the “future of work” in a world where a vast majority of us are effectively (if claustrophobically) working from our homes; even as we contemplate all of this, I think perhaps the most important lesson of our collective ordeal is the power of compassion…and perhaps more specifically, our choice -- as masters of our fate, captains of our soul -- to show compassion.

Something to contemplate during this holiday weekend.