Books such as these, give visual images that are necessary to make learning stick. It is fair to say that I do not remember anything much about cell biology nor anything related to DNA. It was way back in my high school that I had crammed something, held it in my working memory for a few years in order to write exams. Some bits would have percolated to my long term memory, but since I have never retrieved them, they lie somewhere in some inaccessible part of my brain.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkh5y4R_RD0]

A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable.

Ani Pema Chodron, the author of the book, gave a commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of Naropa, University of Boulder, Colorado. She did so, to keep her promise with her grand daughter, who was amongst the graduating class. The speech went viral on the net and this book is an offshoot of it. It contains the full text of the speech and a Q&A session. The title of the speech and hence the book, is inspired from a quote by Samuel Beckett.