Never Stop: A Memoir - Softcover

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Simba Sana is the co-founder and former CEO of Karibu Books, a major indie bookselling phenomenon. Based in his native Washington, D.C., Karibu was perhaps the most successful black-owned book-industry business ever. A former amateur boxer and manager of two professional super-middleweight boxers, Sana graduated from Mount Saint Mary's University with a double major in accounting and business. He later earned a masters degree in African Studies from Howard University and a masters degree in liberal arts from St. John's College. Sana lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.

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“A candid testimony of struggle and achievement.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An amazing story of overcoming challenges and turning setbacks into incredible comebacks. Captivating and compelling.” —Dr. Willie Jolley, bestselling author of A Setback Is a Setup for a Comeback

“Never Stop reminds us with bold honesty that sometimes we have to lose everything to gain the unimaginable something greater.” —Patrice Gaines, author of Laughing in the Dark

“A brutally honest and powerful memoir written with an open heart. Ultimately a story of triumph, love, and success, Never Stop is also a story of the struggles that often accompany our search for personal peace. This is a book that gives you the courage to examine your own life and the permission to change it.” —Bruce Babashan, USA boxing coach

Never Stop starts out as a powerful account of achieving worldly success against all odds and turns into a deeply intimate search for personal peace, fulfillment, love, and healing. Simba Sana was the cofounder and longtime leader of the Karibu bookstore chain, perhaps the most successful black-owned company in the history of the book industry. His story reveals how his experience with Karibu jump–started his lifelong journey to better understanding himself, human nature, faith, and American culture—which ultimately helped him develop the powerful personal philosophy that drives his life today.

Born Bernard Sutton in Washington, DC, the son of a mentally ill single mother, Sana grew up in the cycle of poverty and violence that dominated inner-city life in the ’70s and ’80s. Despite a bout of homelessness and deep involvement with street crime, Sana’s academic success got him into college, where he flourished. Committed to self-improvement and self-discipline, he became a successful professional while also becoming an impassioned Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist. He lived the corporate life at Ernst & Young by day while leading radical consciousness-raising groups by night.

Building Karibu became Sana’s opportunity to bind the disparate elements of his life together. Ultimately, though, the paradoxes in his identity and his accumulated emotional wounds confounded his effort to overcome his business reversals, and everything Sana built—his marriage, family, and business—was lost in a calamitously brief period of time. Sana had to rebuild his life—and his identity—and set out to do so in a way that focused principally on the meaning and importance of love.

Never Stop, in the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and other great personal narratives, is alternately wrenching and inspiring—and one of the most important memoirs to be published this year.

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Love, I came to understand, isn’t a conscious thing, or some entity that can be constructed by the mind. Coming to love with Trian wasn’t like my marriage or any other previous relationship I’d experienced, and it’s nothing like what I’d heard love could be. And though I recognized and acknowledged Trian’s beauty, I never had any urge to pursue her. Instead, I experienced, for the first time, love as recognition, a sense of knowing. There was no choice or decision involved. The desire for love had always been in my heart, but it was my journey toward self-discovery that unknowingly helped me experience it. In my case, once I recognized who Trian was, there was no desire to be with anyone else.

Honesty was essential in my quest for love. I wholly disagreed with my former therapist when he told me I shouldn’t have admitted to Monica that I didn’t love her. It was the truth; the real problem was my own failure to truly see it. Once I became aware of it, I realized that my pre–wedding ceremony behavior, such as not buying an engagement ring and visiting all those various women to compare them to Monica, were clear indications that I didn’t love her. By openly acknowledging what was false about my feelings for her, I opened the door to discovering love.

With Trian, I was able to see myself more clearly. From the very beginning, I was honest with her about where I was. She knew about the general state of my marriage, and I made my intentions known to her every step of the way. When I got the inkling that my feelings with her were about more than just business, I told her. Honesty and vulnerability, from the beginning, were of greatest importance in dealing with Trian. Effort, will, and determination, which had always been the keys to how I approached life, played no role here.

Perhaps the greatest thing about coming to love this way was that I discovered it on my own. Reading what Krishnamurti and others had written about love certainly made it easier for me to talk about it, but my own experiences were the basis for this discovery, and nothing and no one could take that from me. I knew I’d done many foolish things over the course of my journey, but finding love made it well worth it.

I wasn’t the same person as before. It felt good to move through life no longer alternating between emptiness and yearning to be with someone. I didn’t need a rule or a commandment to follow in order to make myself believe that I was moral. Love itself was goodness, and coming to love with Trian allowed that goodness to permeate my being.

I began to contemplate the subject of love and came to recognize that it’s been such a great mystery for humanity because we’ve always tried to understand it using thought. However, I no longer embrace the idea that any particular method or system of thought can grasp love, or bring it about. To really find love, you have to be willing to travel the often harsh and arduous road of self discovery, if necessary, in order to see yourself as you are at any given moment. Krishnamurti called this the clarity of self-knowing.

After reading Krishnamurti and contemplating his work, and my own experiences, I became disappointed by the paucity of good information on the subject of love. One day, while travelling through the city, I was hit by an urge to write down my own description of love. After about a month of poring over my thoughts and tweaking what I’d penned, I finally had something I considered a good description of that which really exists beyond description.

Love: a deep, never–ending connection, beyond words,
that is discovered with no prescribed path, causing a
life–altering commitment, not based on thought,
knowledge, time, choice, or sex, and without motive, condition,
or explanation.

This description really says more about what love is not than what love is, but my hope in offering it is to point people in love’s general direction, and more importantly, help them see how essential it is to engage in the work of self-discovery. At bottom, defining what love is isn’t as important as experiencing it, because to experience it is to know it.

In fact, the human effort to explain and define what love is has led to our collective confusion. In my view, the notion, for example, that we can fall in and out of love with someone, which of course is widely accepted, is actually sadly mistaken. If God is love, as we so often quote from the New Testament, then loving someone else can’t be temporary. God certainly isn’t temporary. God simply is. Thus, love between two people doesn’t fade over time, or due to circumstance, and only ends with physical demise.

I’m a movie buff, and I felt very fortunate to discover that romantic comedies are really onto something about love. The novelists and screenwriters responsible for these movies have figured out what nearly all of the philosophers have failed to uncover: that true love happens in an instant. The plot in romance movies is generally the same: the lead character begins to follow his or her desire for love, and so embarks on the simple–yet–difficult task of seeing him– or herself. And, like magic, the other person appears in his or her life. The consummation of the love relationship is oftentimes inconvenient, convoluted, and seemingly inappropriate, but in the end love always makes the finite world yield to its will.

Time and time again, the really good romantic comedies demonstrate that love is a noncausal occurrence: a case of meaningful coincidence, which brings with it a sense of knowing without the why or the how. Our problem as human beings is that we’re afraid of thought being suspended long enough to allow this type of knowledge, which is the only true knowing, to inform us.