EMPOWERING EASE, JOY & EFFECTIVENESS
EExecutive Education, Personal and Professional development Programmes



Cultivating gentleness in a world of force and coercion

Picture
Bella Enahoro
When I arrived in L.A from London in the early 2000s, I was on a professional development program in UCLA. My week days were made up of studying films, analysing screenplays and writing them and evenings made up of anything that took me to the Santa Monica bluffs north of Wilshire and the Malibu coastline. My weekends were made up of breakfast by the ocean, wandering through the farmers market on Arizona and taking leisurely meetings in the Barnes and Noble on 3rd street. I spent so much time in that bookshop, that the manager offered me a job on completion of my program. I now wonder why I never took her up on it. Ah well! 

For the first time in years, I had time on my hands. Time to discover, contemplate, befriend, explore and delight. I loved to walk everywhere, feel the landscape through my feet. My friends mocked my English ways – why on earth spend ten minutes walking to Westwood when we could jump in the car and be there in three. The fact that we'd then spend twenty minutes looking for a parking space seemed to escape them. Besides, I encountered my first humming bird as I walked down from Hilgard avenue to Westwood boulevard. I was struck into enchanted stillness.  Were I in a car, I would have missed this.

My life took on a gentler pace. I didn't just see the shimmering ocean or drive along the magnificent Pacific Coast Highway, I felt it and it was good. I could 'feel' my life again and more importantly I was living life in such a way that I wanted to feel it again. It was during this time I discovered what has come to be known as 'gentle fiction'. I mean those books that tell stories of characters wrestling with life's ordinary problems, rather than global ones.  Books that don't aim to shock you, just to enchant you into a good, thoughtful read. Books that cultivate gentleness as a way to bring life back into focus.

Many of us may believe gentleness is for small town living or days long gone. In today's brash, harsh world, with the media falling over itself to stream into our homes constant images of humanity brutalised, gentleness is tantamount to wearing a sign saying 'eat me' or at the very least 'run me over'. Aggression and coercive tactics are how to get things done and done quickly. Yes, there's a time for that – at least at this point in human relations.  But being in fight mode all the time, we hear from the scientific community, creates diseases in our body. See especially the works of Bruce Lipton and Candice Pert among others - see books in column alongside. 

Learning to relate to oneself and to the life immediately around us in tenderness is a forgotten art. I find myself curt, short with the barrista making my coffee, impatient at the checkout counter, cursing at the lights to turn green, finger stabbing elevator buttons to get the thing moving, always on the blackberry, I march through London streets with my metaphorical elbows out – and at the end of the day flop onto my sofa exhausted, only having accomplished half the things I wanted to during the day, and ask myself why? 

Recently I've taken to seeking out and cultivating areas of deliberate gentleness in my life. I watch different things on television, read different books and I've had the great pleasure of discovering the wonderful world of gentle fiction.

The list of writers in gentle fiction is, I'm happy to say, long but I've highlighted the five below as my current favourites.

Be good to yourself and listen to one of them today.

Copyright ©Bella Enahoro Feb 2011

If you like this page, please Bookmark and share with with others

The privilege of finding
is reserved for those who seek


BUY NOW CD here


BUY NOW CD here

Sue Monk Kidd is a constant delight and revelation in both her fictional and non-fictional writing I still find myself dipping both into her inspirational writings and her wonderful novel the THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES which is by turns funny, sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic.


Philip Gulley is belly-laugh spectacular in an understated way. His HARMONY series are a joy and his non-fictional work will help you get back on track if you need it and help you appreciate being on track if you're already on it.

Thousands of readers have fallen in love with Gulley's HOME TO HARMONY, a charming novel of a small town with a kindly spirit whose endearing and eccentric residents are like old friends. Written in a warm, down-home style, this novel chronicles the moving and humorous world of Quaker pastor Sam Gardner in his first year back in his hometown. Sam reflects on the quirks of human nature in such memorable vignettes as "The Aluminum Years," in which a bumbling Sam mulls over the proper aluminum item to give his wife for their tenth anniversary.

BUY NOW CD here



Mitch Ablom is beautiful.  In 5 PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN he reminds us that there is profound value the everydayness of our lives. THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is a wonderfully moving fable that addresses the meaning of life, and life after death, in the poignant way that made TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE such an astonishing book.

The novel's protagonist is an amusement park maintenance worker named Eddie who, while operating a ride called the "Free Fall", dies while trying to save a young girl who gets in the way of a falling cart that hurtles to earth. Eddie goes to heaven, where he meets five people who were unexpectedly instrumental in some way in his life. While each guide takes him through heaven, Eddie learns a little bit more about what his time on earth meant, what he was supposed to have learned, and what his true purpose on earth was.



Alexander McCall Smith whom I first discovered through his books THE NO 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY set in Botswana, featuring Precious Romotswe and friends. It has since been made into a successful BBC television series. I was delighted by him when I heard him speak at UCLA and he confessed to being and amateur Bassonist and co-founder of the The Really Terrible Orchestra. Any of the No1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY series will make you smile and charm you back into the gentler rhythms of life.




Jan Karon's MITFORD series is much loved and filled with interesting souls, each one an integral part of Mitford's crazy quilt of characters. Father Tim is the perfect choice for a modern hero. Tom Cruise, he's not, but he has so much warmth, humor and humaness, that the gentle reader can forgive him for not being young, sleek and in gym-perfect shape. I also loved Fr. Tim's highly opinionated secretary and his newly found lady love. I recommend reading The Mitford Series in the order they were published. By reading the books as they were written, the reader comes to know each highly crafted character deeply.