Remade in his own voice

The last key of the fourth month is a book about a man who remade himself more than once, in public, and told the whole story in his own words.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley and published in 1965, is one of the great American accounts of transformation. A boy whose father died violently and whose family was broken apart. A young man in the street life of Boston and Harlem. A prisoner who, at twenty, could barely write a letter, and who taught himself by copying a dictionary page by page, by hand, every word, until he could read anything and speak to anyone. A minister and a national figure. And then, after a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 where he prayed and ate beside people of every color, a man willing to say in public that he'd been wrong about some of his deepest beliefs, and to change them, knowing what it would cost. He was killed a year later.

I'm teaching the shape, not the politics, and the shape is the point of this chamber. Meaning was made by him three times over, each time from discipline: the discipline of the dictionary, the discipline of a strict daily practice, and the hardest discipline of all, which is revising your convictions in front of people who watched you build them.

The dictionary is the key I'd keep. A man in a cell, with nothing, copying words. He said later that from that day he never again felt he was not free. Reading did that. Not the content of any one book. The act of taking the mind in hand and training it, alone, when nobody required it.

Every key in this year has asked for a small daily discipline. His life says what a small daily discipline can build, and what it can let a person become, and become again.