دانلود رمان انگلیسی “دختری روی پشت بام”

As I begin to write, a vivid memory comes crashing into my mind. I have once again climbed up onto the roof of a sprawling old heritage house in Brisbane in 􀵡􀵩􀵣􀵤. I am escaping from my nanny, my brothers, my parents, and, I hope, the rest of the world. Hidden among the many gables of the roof, I feel safe, happy, and sure of myself. I have my books, my imagination, and my bird’s-eye view of the goings and comings of the household below. When it gets too hot on the roof, I read in the branches of a thick-leaved custard apple tree at the bottom of the garden. On wet days, I read by torchlight, hidden behind the sloping back of a giant sofa in the drawing room, while distinguished visitors come and go. I mistakenly believe that no one knows where I am. In the words of the inventor of Pooh Bear, A.A. Milne, ‘It isn’t really Anywhere! It’s somewhere else Instead!’ I realise now, of course, that everyone knew perfectly well where I was. Otherwise, they would have been searching for me and probably calling the police. I suspect that everyone was only too glad that this troublesome child was safely out of the way, occupied in the respectable activity of reading. They could not know, or probably didn’t notice, that I was in the process of turning into a life-long contrarian. I was to go on and make myself a nuisance in many fields. My time on the roof helped me handle the many different versions of who I ought to be. My fun-loving mother, my silent father, my strict nanny, the so-called servants, my warring brothers, and even the creative teachers in my Montessori-type preschool all thought it was their duty to mould me into someone more like them. My laughing first nanny wanted me to enjoy life. My strict second nanny wanted me to do what I was told. As the object of their child-rearing, I was left trying to be both. On the roof, I felt I belonged, I became myself. I could think about things and watch what was happening on the ground at the same time. The world seemed full of competing messages. My two nannies confounded me with their different modes of proper behaviour. My mother wanted a dutiful daughter; my father wanted me to be a scientist. Later on, at university, I became a party girl and a high achiever, two things usually thought of as opposites. On environmental issues, I would support both conservation and development, according to the circumstances. Back on the roof, another double message came to me from what I saw happening on the ground. People did not practise what they preached; their actions did not match their stated ideals. I thought that mattered. I still think it matters when people say they are a close community and then isolate some of their group. It matters when a child protection agency doesn’t have the funds to visit their charges. It matters when an organisation claims to care about the environment and clear-fells a protected forest. On the roof, I was concerned that the small part of society I saw below was typical of the rest, which did not seem to be fair. I have never lost the feeling that a society should be fair. Margaret Thatcher once said that there is no such thing as society. On the other hand, Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff suggests that everything we do is framed by the society in which we live. He writes that the public funding of ageing, hospitals, and schools, tells us that our society is willing to care for the needs of strangers. As an ideal, we are prepared to meet the needs of others, even when they are different from our own. A problem arises from this difference. There can be competition and not collaboration between the different interests in the community; the ideals of one group can be incompatible with those of another. Leonard Cohen sings that a crack in the space between ideals and actions is where the light can come in, and where learning can happen. The space between ‘what should be’ and ‘what is’ is the place where people’s needs for a fairer society can be met. When ‘what should be’ and ‘what is’ do not match, it is time for everyone concerned to accept that there is need for change. Like Ignatieff and Cohen I believe that a society can be a place of caring and support, and that it has the capacity to learn and change. My life has been spent working in that space. In writing this memoir, I have drawn on my eidetic memory. This rare ability provides a basis for me to revisit events I have witnessed over the course of my life. In my working and my personal life, I am able to recall real events as they happened, as well as drawing on my long-term memory. Wikipedia describes people with an eidetic memory as having the capacity to hold a visual image with such clarity that they can describe it almost as it happened. It is not a photographic memory, although it includes some elements of that. It is the ability to recall accurately feelings and insights that occurred in a given moment long before. I continue to observe people making their own choices and living their own lives. On the roof, the change I thought was necessary was for people to link their actions to their ideals. On the ground, that can be difficult when the link has been broken. My nine ‘decades’ range in length from seventeen years (the long first decade) to eight years (the short second and third decades). All through this time, I enjoyed bringing about changes that strengthen a community and inspire individuals. I worked with a prime minister, large corporations, large and small government agencies, whole communities, individuals, and social activists. In workshops, I brought together people who were responsible for making decisions and those who could take action to fulfil them. I delivered collective learning workshops in many countries to help communities with their chosen changes. If people were unable to make their much-wanted changes, they faced ‘wicked’ problems — problems that could not be resolved with existing resources and current ways of thinking. In this case, they needed to seek help from others. After I came down from the roof, much later, I developed a working model for collective learning among communities trying to tackle their own wicked problems. This collective social-learning model was designed to support the changes sought by large and small, powerful and humble communities, at their own request. The success of the model led to its adoption from 􀵡􀵩􀵨􀵢 until today, in many countries and with many communities, large and small. The requests for help increased with the rise of concern for environmental futures. In 􀵡􀵩􀵨􀵤 I put together a team of change-makers to meet this emerging demand, with the title of the Local Sustainability Project. My passion for books provided a starting place where I could look for help for collective learning in theory and in practice. Architect Christopher Alexander and anthropologist Gregory Bateson each searched for ‘the patterns that connect’. In 􀵡􀵩􀵧􀵧, Alexander published A Pattern Language to ensure that planners and builders connected the parts that made up their complex projects. His scope included cities and towns and villages, and communities and individuals. I have applied Alexander’s pattern language throughout this memoir. His focus on the parts as well as the whole has helped me to base my own story on connections and relationships. In a pattern language, everything is connected. The divisions created by using the words ‘or’ and ‘but’ are replaced by a connecting ‘and’. A program that can service cities and towns and villages is very different from a program that addresses cities or towns or villages. For my workshops, using ‘and’ allowed me to support the whole range of environments, while ‘or’ would have limited it to one. The same applies to the relationship between a team and its members. ‘And’ will refer to each of them; ‘or’, to only one. This memoir is also full of lists, including a list of my decades, my life stages, and my occupations. Bateson in his Mind and Nature: a necessary unity stresses the importance of treating a list as a thing in itself, and each item on that list as having its own identity and integrity. In Australia and around the world, something stuck in my mind. While my success at influencing change and our long list of bookings for workshops should have made me content with how far we had come, there always seemed to be something happening in a workshop that I couldn’t explain. The more successful the workshops were in achieving the change that our partners wanted to bring about, the more that ‘something else’ emerged. After a Rockefeller retreat at Bellagio in 􀵡􀵩􀵩􀵩, I discovered that a way of thinking had emerged in the 􀵡􀵩th century as five traditions that competed with one another. The five knowledge cultures I identified at Bellagio were individual, community, expert, organisational, and holistic. It took until my seventh decade for me to understand how to get our workshops to make sure that the knowledge cultures fitted together and collaborated. The table of contents for this memoir is a list of the nine decades that, taken together, make up my life. On the roof, and later, I recognised the need to find ways of collaboration and collective learning among communities who were trying to match their actions to their ideals. Putting that recognition into practice is a thread woven throughout my decades. As well as having a working life, in each of the nine decades I had been living a ‘life of my own’. I was the girl on the roof, a wild student, a wife, a mother of three, an academic, a public servant, a professor, a caregiver, and a writer. With each decade so different from the others, it is easy to conclude that in each decade I lived a different life. Together, the decades make up the story I am telling here: nine decades, nine lives.