Melinda Gates0:00
McMillon Audio presents The Moment of Lift, written and narrated for you by Melinda Gates.
Introduction. When I was little, space launches were a huge deal in my life. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, in a Catholic family with four kids, a stay-at-home mom, and an aerospace engineer dad who worked on the Apollo program. On the day of the launch, we'd all pile into the car and drive to the home of one of my dad's friends, another Apollo engineer, and watch the drama together. I can still feel in my bones the suspense of those countdowns. 20 seconds and counting. T-minus 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. 12, 11, 10, 9, ignition sequence start. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. All engines running. Liftoff! We have liftoff. Those moments always gave me a thrill, especially that moment of lift when the engines ignite and the earth shakes and the rocket starts to rise. I recently came across the phrase 'moment of lift' in a book by Mark Nepo, one of my favorite spiritual writers. He uses the words to capture a moment of grace. Something was lifted like a scarf on the wind, he writes, and his grief went silent and he felt whole. Mark's image of lift is filled with wonder, and wonder has two meanings for me. It can mean 'ahh' and it can mean curiosity. I have loads of awe, but just as much curiosity. I want to know how lift happens. At one time or another, we've all been sitting on a plane at the end of a long takeoff run, waiting anxiously for the moment of lift. When the kids were little and we were on the plane ready to take off, I'd say to them, 'Wheels, wheels, wheels,' and the moment the plane got off the ground, I'd say, 'Wings.' When the kids were a bit older, they would join me and we all said it together for years. Once every so often, though, we'd say 'wheels, wheels, wheels' more times than we expected, and I'd be thinking, why is it taking so long to get off the ground? Why does it sometimes take so long, and why does it sometimes happen so fast? What takes us past the tipping point when the forces pushing us up overpower the forces pulling us down, and we're lifted from the earth and begin to fly? As I've traveled the world for 20 years doing the work of the foundation I co-founded with my husband Bill, I've wondered: how can we summon a moment of lift for human beings, and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. And how can we create a moment of lift in human hearts so that we all want to lift up women? Because sometimes all that's needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down. In my travels, I've learned about hundreds of millions of women who want to decide for themselves whether and when to have children, but they can't. They have no access to contraceptives. And there are many other rights and privileges that women and girls are denied: the right to decide whether and when and whom to marry, the right to go to school, earn an income, work outside the home, walk outside the home, spend their own money, shape their budgets, start a business, get a loan, own property, divorce a husband, see a doctor, run for office, ride a bike, drive a car, go to college, study computers, find investors. All these rights are denied to women in some parts of the world. Sometimes these rights are denied under law, but even when they're allowed by law, they're still often denied by cultural bias against women.
