Day 42 Corona Virus lock down diaries Thursday

I cannot believe it is Thursday already! I wish I had of had a longer period of “holiday” Corona – sigh. Also cannot believe it’s like 7 weeks until half the year is finished. Mind boggling.

Thankfully no early calls this morning. So I was up and off walking at 07h50. I missioned up the hill from Problem Mkhize Road (yes, they changed a road name to Problem – and didn’t see a problem with it 🤣) to Musgrave Road. I wanted to see the awesome view from the bridge.

Along the way there were friendly people saying “hello” and others who were cold. I have done this walk often over the years at varying times of the day. Today was the first time I have ever seen families and/or a parent and young child out walking together. It was such a good energy. It was genuinely lovely to see. I honestly hope that some of this less rushed, more soulful style of living stays with humanity.

I made it to the bridge, my nose severely itchy with all the condensation of my breath mixed with the mask fabric. I stood there, disappointed. Trees have grown, obscuring some of the view, but way worse than that – the smog is back already. Four level 4 mornings, and the air is smoggy again. I was saddened. The Earth does not deserve the pandemic of humans. I then made my way down to the road below… The rubbish everywhere was terrible. There was even an old photo album with various photos strewn about with the remnants of wasted, rotted food and the like. I wondered if the removal guys back on 2001, who lost the box holding the precious possessions of my 21st photo album and the like, had left them on the side of a road too… the earth never deserved humans.

Back for breakfast, guilt for energy as the Methodist Church have been called to fast and pray on Thursday mornings. I ate and took my long list of tablets.

Then posted a cool WatsApp motivational video into the emptiness of the black hole of the teenage world of virtual classroom space.

Packed up and headed to school. A far less criminal effort than a few weeks ago. It was a wonderful surprise to receive a dongle with data on from one of my grade 10’s parents. So awesome to be the recipient of someone’s generosity and kindness. After some trial and error manoeuvres, I eventually figured out how to use the device. I am certainly learning a great deal about my subject material and working through online platforms in these uncertain times.

It was a long 10am – 5pm working day. It was great to have two colleagues pop by and chat. I think everyone is happier to chat after being so deprived of alternative company for so long. When there is less rush, there is more time to listen and learn about each other.

The classes were fairly quiet, but that was ok, because I was trying to sort out network cables, parent emails, Google Classroom updates and the like. When I posted an assignment to the group, then there was a bit more chatter about how to hand in, when, which one is this, but the other one, etc, etc, etc. From emails, there are a lot of challenging situations through this tough season. Lord, I hope people seem, find and choose You. Nothing else makes any sense.

Pack up.

Head home.

A touch of family politics. A touch of Body Corporate politics. A few efforts at WatsApps across adult teacher work platforms.

A beautifully haunting moonrise. No red ring like last night though.

Tired me. Very tired me… but safe and in the presence of a God who is with me in my little 50m2 and loves me and all my doubt, questioning, bumbling and perseverance. Thanks for being with me Lord. I couldn’t have done this isolation alone. Lots of Love. Shannan

Educated Guessing: focus on your own Puzzle Part 1 Draft

First thoughts: Educated Guessing: Focus on your own puzzle

I’m not going to put this ‘book’ in numerical chapters because neither of us are identical in the way we live, the way we see things, or the way we process things. I am simply going to list my thoughts and ideas as they unfold, for you to apply as you will, or not.

For me, however, following on from the rationale above, I think that is the most important start to make: the realisation that you and I, you and your neighbour, you and your wife, you and your child/children, you and your colleagues, you and every other person you will ever engage with, do not think the same way. It seems to be something that I come across frequently, people expecting other people to do, think and be the same as they are. In the introduction, I wrote about how illogical I think it is to drink alcohol. I see alcohol as a poison that nurses put on your skin to kill things before an injection. I see alcohol as something that kills off the organs in the body, brain cells, sensibility, manners, the bank account… but that is me and my perspective. Other people see alcohol as ‘the only way to relax’, their only ‘hope to get through’ and, the most popular and scary for me: ‘the only way I can talk to other people’; and so the reasons go with many variations, all of which pretty much stick around ignoring/pretending to erase a fear of some sort, instead of facing it. So where I have one thought about alcohol, which dictates my approach to it, other people have a different approach. I see alcohol as the cause of pain, suffering and hurt, because my sister’s boyfriend was killed by a drunk and high driver around his 18^th birthday. The boy in the passenger seat was also killed. The unending heartache for those families and friends, the unending nightmares and social issues for the other two boys who were in the car, but who got to stay alive. Those deaths, and that trauma, became a permanent part of our lives because we lost the irreplaceable, because the drunk driver chose alcohol and drugs. I am not sure how that drunk driver gets through his days knowing he chose to end those lives, but I am VERY sure, that I do NOT want that story. I DO NOT want to be the cause of hurting and breaking other people.

For me, that’s where the journey needs to start: Understanding I am responsible for my story and my actions, no-one else is. I am alone in creating my story, by living out my choices, and it is impossible to change that. No one person is identical to me, can see like me, think like me or be like me. Whatever direction I take, it is going to be challenging, but I can choose to make it worthwhile, or not. Full stop.

Andy Stanley did an excellent series of sermons where he asked his congregation: “What is the story you want to tell?” It was such a prolific moment for me to watch the sermons and listen to his perspective on living. Living is a creative process. There is no long letter or big book – (who is actually reading much these days anyway with illiteracy being so high and electronic LOL shorthand and hieroglyphics taking over? Irony that this is a book is not lost on me) – that falls from the sky personally addressed to you to tell you what to do with your life. It’s all educated (in some cases anyway) improvisation. I listen and respond. Choice, cause and effect; action, reaction and consequence are how life and stories get created and such logic is also part of most Holy Books. I will seldom type “all” because I cannot write about everything, and because I do not know everything. In fact the more I read and learn, the more I learn that I know very little in proportion to what there is to learn and know. (I also know that someone said that before me and nothing anyone creates is ‘original’, almost everything is a follow on from what came before it – if electricity hadn’t been invented, the 21st century would look very different)…(sorry if my brackets annoy you, but I type as I think and my brain diverts so easily…sigh).

So, what story do I want to tell? That was the question I was presented with. Years later, and as a person who loves colour, photography, art and pictures, the ‘story’ took on a visual image for me – a PUZZLE. A jigsaw puzzle. (Interesting aside: when I was a boarding mistress I took out a puzzle and about 75% of the termly boarders had never seen or completed a puzzle before, so please Google it if you are one of those 75% – pretty please.) Each day I am creating and placing a puzzle piece into my puzzle, and there is no eraser. The picture will morph as I change, but the piece will never ever move. What is done, cannot be undone, as Shakespeare scribed once upon a time. Once that day has been lived, it becomes a permanent part of my picture puzzle. Then what I realised further, was that I don’t have a 2D puzzle, I actually have a 5D puzzle. My puzzle includes sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing. My puzzle connects with other people’s puzzles, my puzzle morphs and grows as some days a puzzle piece can be large (like the death of a loved one, or the international recognition of one of my plays) or it could be small (I sat in front of a TV for the day and nothing changed – I have managed to reduce these small days by not owning a TV that is connected to anything but a DVD player). Life must have a balance of the big puzzle pieces and the small puzzle pieces, but, as already mentioned, the BIG and complete puzzle picture will be a result of the small puzzle pieces too. Nothing is irrelevant or excluded from the puzzle.

Then I was hit by a scary thought from when I lived in London. There was a lady who did nothing but take a taxi to work and back, and eat (delivered) in front of the TV, with necessary trips to the toilet and bed. Her life, by her choices, was turning into a 2D puzzle. I have no idea if she ever broke her cycle, but my educated guess is: probably not. Seeing what she was becoming through what she did, hit me sideways with showing me who I did not want to be, and what I did not want my puzzle to look like at the end of my days.

Yet, anyone who has ever sat completing a jigsaw puzzle will know (aside: those 75% of girls who had never done a puzzle – once again reminded me that other people ARE NOT ME and I cannot think that anyone else sees things the same way I do or was brought up the same way I was, we are all very different), you start with the box. You start with the final picture on the box to know what you are up to. You see what you want the final picture to look like and when you know what it must look like, you go about putting it together. If you have no idea what the final picture you are working towards is, then there is no joy, no accomplishment, no reason to persevere, frustration, annoyance and several dozen hours more hard work and effort that needed to be made. So this became my thought:

To create a more purposeful life, to create a less frustrating life, to build the story puzzle I would like to be my life story’s epitaph, what do I want my final picture to look like?

I needed to choose what I was creating. I needed to know what the final picture goal was. All I knew was that I wanted to be remembered, I wanted to do something that would impact someone or something in a positive way. I knew that it wasn’t going to be by becoming a famous actress, as my acting career hit a dead end when life got the better of me in London. It wasn’t going to be by becoming a renowned voice over artist like I had hoped, because that had also ended at a sudden halt when I had to make serious financial decisions and move to an area where voice overs and acting weren’t even an option.  I also looked back over my life and realised that all the decisions I had made that were based on money or fame as their central thread, had turned out really badly. I knew that financial status (and owning ‘stuff’) meant nothing in the long term of who I wanted to be and the story I wanted to tell, even if the comfort and ease of having money would have been greatly appreciated. So what did I want the picture to be of? What do you want your picture to be of?

I went to the end of the story. My epitaph. I have attended a lot of funerals and they become a blur, just like weddings and other functions. I often don’t remember what was said by whom, but I do remember the personal relationship I did or do not have with that person. So at my funeral, I would like everyone who is there to have something good in their heart, or memories, about me. I know of a funeral where 7 people attended with the funeral arranging staff. There are John Doe cremations where no-one even knew that person’s name. Then I have been to memorials where there wasn’t even enough room in the memorial venue to accommodate all the people. I have been to funerals where the energy and lives of the people attending fundamentally changed at the loss of that person from their life. That’s what I wanted. I want to live a life, so that when I am gone, someone notices, someone misses the little things, someone remembers that there was a lady (and yes, I would like to be remembered as a lady, so I need to create that too) who made my life a little brighter, a little easier, a little happier and I miss her. I would hope that in that missing me that person would go on to be a little brighter for someone else, offer to help someone else and make someone else’s life a little easier and even a little happier. If I manage to connect with 200 people between the hundreds I have studied with, thousands I have taught and hundreds I have worked with, then maybe, of those 200, 100 will take up the reigns to make the world a little better and maybe 50 will pass it down their bloodline and maybe 1 will carry it through so that in hundreds of years’ time someone is still helping someone else because of my story. Still, we know life has no guarantees, but it has the option of choosing faith, hope and love, which is what I decided I wanted to choose. Now I have to live a life that supports my choice. That is the hard part, because it feels like there is most certainly a force that does not want to make it easy for me to choose faith, hope, love, joy, peace and all that is good.

Of course, on the flip side, I don’t have to choose to have an impact. I can choose to abuse people, I can choose to be nasty, I can decide that I want the grand final puzzle picture to be one of me in prison, a poster child for ‘who you don’t want as your role model’. That’s obviously an option too. Other people do choose this story. They go out and do drugs, booze it up, choose gangs and violence, choose the external locus of control and they want a ‘heavy’ story that causes hurt, pain and suffering.

Just as choosing to have a good story and sticking to it, no matter how hard it is, is the way to create a final puzzle picture, so too is the choice of having a prison story, a story of choosing what goodness would condemn. If you want to have a prison story you need to steal, kill, break in and all the rest and you will get your prison story. Whatever you would like, choose it.

I can picture people’s tempers and shackles rising as they read this, but it’s true. You have a choice: join the gang or don’t. 1) join it and kill other people and destroy their families’ lives forever and add to the hate and you die OR 2) don’t join and you die. 1) is the choice of fear and 2) is the choice of love. NEITHER are easy. NEITHER are ‘right’. BOTH are options. Choose and follow through with your choice so that you get what you would like your story to be in the end. In his book “Conversations with God” Neale Donald Walsch goes deeper into the understanding of this concept of choice. This idea that everyone is going to suffer; and this ties in with Viktor Frankl’s reason for surviving the German Concentration camp in World War Two: “if you have a why, you can deal with any how”. He loved his wife, which was his purpose, which was his goal, to see her again. He wanted to write a book on the psychology of surviving a concentration camp, which was his purpose, his why and his goal. His wife was killed in another concentration camp and he never got to see any of his loved ones again as they were all killed. But, he did create his survival through life in a horrific concentration camp. Which led to that fact that he did write his book. Furthermore he presented profound work on the psychology around existentialism (just because something exists, it doesn’t mean it has meaning, meaning must be created) and the existential vacuum (the time on a Sunday evening when I, as a human, have everything I need and yet, I have no idea what to do with myself – I have to create something to do … this is often where people turn to alcohol, crime, X-Box, Facebook, purposeless time-fillers just to get through the emptiness of the silence of the space).

So: STEP ONE – write your epitaph. Think about, and write out how you want your story to look at the end. Create the final end picture of YOUR OWN PUZZLE, so you can start to put the pieces together to make it happen. No, it won’t be easy to create on paper or in real life, but it will be a ‘why’ that will push you through unbelievable: ‘but how’s?’.

Earth’s Biggest Problem? People

I awoke this morning to find a text message from a friend asking for prayer for her mom to pass away from her cancer, as her mom is in pain and gasping instead of breathing. So horrible. I replied with a prayer and then sent more for the family.

I couldn’t handle being indoors after that, it felt too claustrophobic, so I took a walk to drop off the DVD I’d hired last night. It was a Pixar DVD where I had no idea that there would be scenes where I would inexplicably cry my heart out. It feels like all the tears that I’d held in for 30 years of my life, because ‘big girls don’t cry’ {and because all crying does is draw attention and sympathy and the feeling like ‘I can’t control myself’ and ‘others are looking down on me’}, have been rushing out over the last 5 years. It Sucks. I’ve absolutely learnt that I am not in control of anything and I hate it. So last night I was in tears without anyone around; and now I’m typing about it with a sense of embarrassment because drawings with voice overs hit my heart so hard. It doesn’t help that I’ve never been so tired before in my life. Moving to teach English has been mental. True stupidity! Minimum of 7 HOURS of marking per weekend! {Hence no more blogging 😦 } So that’s every one of my Sundays gone, for no overtime or extra pay on my R90 per hour working weekday pay… I couldn’t face the 3 sets piled on my desk waiting to demotivate me, as most learners have listened to NOTHING I have taught them, at 07h30 this morning.

I took the walk to breathe and find something good out there. It was quite something. I found it truly amazing how beautiful a morning is when there are no people involved. No cars with fumes, no drunkards, no-one rushing or pushing or swearing. No-one being irrational. There was space to walk on the pavements, time to wander across main roads, time to take in the trees and flowers and appreciate the sunlight shining on everything. . . Sadly, litter everywhere, urination spots that stink because men urinate wherever they feel like and the homeless loitering as they do because they have nowhere to be. What was destroying the amazing picture? People.

On the Wednesday evening before this Sunday, I went to a public interview with a presenter questioning a guy called Davy du Plessis. Davy survived a shot gun shooting in the Amazon and miraculously lived to tell the tale with a bullet stuck in his heart after 24 hours without medical care. Davy, however, doesn’t view his survival as an ‘Act of God’, he believes it was his own mental power that helped strangers find him in the middle of the Amazon Jungle, that stopped the bullets from being a fraction of a millimetre too high or low from his main heart artery, and he believes it was his mental power that stopped him from bleeding out with regards to his 4 shotgun wounds: face, heart and thigh. I was horrified at his lack of gratitude in surviving, his lack of emotion in surviving and his blasé attitude over the whole thing. Why? Because I view the perfect timing and spacing of everything as a miracle and that is nothing like he believes it, he believes it to be due to his mind power. Now, having survived his ordeal, he is venturing to take a pedal boat from Cape Town to Rio, South America. Why is he doing this? Because humanity is extinguishing 35 species a day on planet earth. Once again, the problem: People. Davy is consumed by the desire to do something to help the planet, so he’s pedaling across the ocean. Once done, I assume he’ll write another book and use paper to print it on. I assume he’ll be getting on flights to spread the word by using petrol, and he’ll be paid for presenting motivational speeches to people who are natural-born consumers… and the cycle (no pun intended) of self-destruction continues as humanity makes flora and fauna extinct without batting an eyelid.

On my walk, I gathered that the people living in cities aren’t aware of the mass extinction that we are the direct cause of. They have vomited in the streets, released feces, urinated, left cans, alcohol bottles, plastic, polystyrene, and numerous other forms of litter everywhere. . . My question is: do such people deserve to continue being stewards of such a beautiful planet? Do we deserve to be here around the luxury of nature as we destroy it?

My answer: No.

Pass-it-On-Book Distribution Lessons

I’m writing this blog as an observational ponderance on the PASS-IT-ON Books that I originally set out to create and pass-on in about March this year. The theory behind them was threefold:
1) For me to spend money and time on something and not keep it, but instead to give it away without expecting anything in return.
2) To get people to interact with each other in person by passing it on from one hand to another and jointly participate in the act of passing on good thoughts and good energy, without ANY technological or electronic anything being involved.
3) For me to pass over control to God, for me to have faith that one day a book would have made it around the world and God would return it to me.

So I set out to follow the calling of getting 100 A5 Books covered in inspirational collages and contact plastic and passed on to 100 people around the world by the end of 2014. Through trial and error I learnt that some pens don’t last under the contact glue. I learnt that people need exact instructions (yet others still don’t follow them and do what they feel like). I learnt that I had to write and ask people not to write on the back of each page as ink bleeds. With the enthusiasm of a child I went about giving away the small creations made with love, given for free and in the faith that their journey would be one that inspired a few people along the way.

5 months and 72 books later, the lessons for me have evolved.
1) I have learnt that many people are not inspired. They walk around daily without a passion or drive or anything that makes them feel joy inside. One person received the book over a month ago and I visited him recently and it was still on his coffee table. He said he didn’t understand what to do… The instructions on the first page read like this: “Please fill in a line with a quote or inspirational thought and pass on as soon as possible. If you can’t think of anything, pass on anyway. Please don’t hang on to the book.” I was amazed that a man with a dean’s list qualification in one of the highest positions a company has to offer couldn’t understand what “fill in and pass on” meant!
Further to this, peoples’ responses have varied to such extremes it has shocked me. From “I always knew you were strange, I’ll just tell the next person that…” to “That is such an incredible idea, you are so inspiring!” “How odd.” “Amazing idea!” “Seriously?” “I’d love to, may I have two?”
2) Far more people in the world have control issues than just me. “But don’t you want it back?” “Surely you want to control where it goes?” No, I’m giving them away and trusting that one day I’ll find one complete somewhere in the world. “Are you serious?” Yes, very serious. Take it and give it away…
3) People fear what others will think of them. They don’t know who to pass it on to. They don’t know who will accept it; they don’t know who to choose. They are worried about what they will look like passing on the book. One girl has had a book since April and I spoke to her this weekend, she’d filled it in, but hasn’t passed it on… Then other people filled it in with a random “It was fun” comment and no idea that their words are possibly going to travel around the globe and last longer than their lifetime! They just didn’t get it. Some knew straight away what their life motto was and they were keen to share it with the world. Yet, some fear what the world may think of them, appearances mean that much to them.

I’ve now realised that if/when I do manage to see a completed book it will truly be a miracle in itself.

The exercise has served to shock me. The diversity of peoples’ reactions and ability to love and share and find joy are galaxies apart… this has saddened me and left me with the prayer that God will help people to let go and share and realise that in their sharing they will come to know that there is nothing to fear and only love, inspiration and joy to be gained… Please Lord, in Your Name I pray. Amen.