Familiar faces

I see you almost every day – with your worn shoes and raggedy clothes, lines for a few peoples’ lifetimes etched across your face. Your mostly shuffling along, looking at nothing much, constantly mumbling. I find myself immediately asking: I wonder how you broke your life? I wonder what you did to get yourself to here? I assume I know what you’re doing that’s keeping you here – the very same reason I don’t even consider giving you money. 

And then, for a moment, I am given a peek at myself, and I am ashamed. I realise that I have decided so many things about you without ever having heard your voice in conversation – I have decided that you must have done something to be where you are; I have decided that you must be the one keeping yourself there. I realise I never ask other questions, questions like: Who are you talking to? How long have they been your companions? What happened to you? How do you cope?

Now, the many homeless on our streets might be an extreme example – I realise that their stories are never simple, and that you will always have those whose stories confirm every stereotypical thought we have. But that’s exactly the point – we live our lives unthinkingly, from the one stereotype to the next, without realising it’s trapping effect. Is that the same as saying that all stereotypes are bad? No, for we do need to be able to box all the information we receive every minute of every day in order for our minds to cope. What is the problem then? That we never really go back to those boxes to sort through what’s in them. We put things, events and people into categories, never again questioning why…unless we are forced to…  

We assume so many things. I would even go as far as to say that most of our life is one big assumption. Even worse? Those assumptions become the basis for not only our reactions, but also our actions. The result? We miss each other; we miss life’s fullness. We live hollow lives without ever noticing it. The interesting thing? You would think that someone like me, someone who knows what it feels like to be stereotyped and judged, would be better. But I am not. And so the cycle repeats itself, and we keep on living past each other, thinking we know everything when actually we know nothing.

What to do? A good mind box spring-clean would be a good start. Making it a regular thing even better. First prize? To start living more consciously – which is the polar opposite from living in our heads – making sure that we don’t just let life and the people around us go by, but that we truly experience each moment. That we stop assuming, that we start risking. Our lives will be the better for it. We might then even consider ourselves rich. We can then definitely know that our lives had worth. 

Value added

Transforming (rediscovering?) value

How do you define the value of a life? Of your life?

Society has given us many ways to define value…or is that success as value…? All of us are almost programmed with lists of things we have to want to be, do and achieve in order to be estimated as valuable. But, when all is said and done, when there is nobody left but you and nothing other than your thoughts and memories – your heart – what are the things that make you feel valuable? What are the things you think about and treasure?

Tonight, as I was sitting on the Gautrain coming home with my youngest godson sleeping on my lap, I realised once again that those are the moments that matter. That those are the things we should be striving toward. When I think back on my life those are the moments I remember, the moments that make my heart feel like bursting with a sense of purpose and wellbeing. Another life trusting me enough to be completely vulnerable with me. I once thought that what you put out into the world, those things that the world around us measures as being successful, would make me feel valuable. But I have come to realise that it is not the academic article I write for three people to read and one to like; the qualifications that I have; the amount of things on society’s checklist that I have been able to tick off, or even living up to what others see as my potential that makes my being present, my living here, meaningful.
The moments that life, my life, has made the most sense were those moments spent with others. It is only in seeing/recognising one another (which implies being and respecting yourself and allowing others the same courtesy), in journeying together and discussing everything from farting to world peace that we can ever start to know what true value is – in the best of times and in the worst of times.

“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.” - Ayn Rand

“Different things delight different people. But it is my delight to keep the ruling faculty sound without turning away either from any man or from any things which happen to men, but looking at and receiving all with welcome eyes and using everything according to its value.” – Marcus Aurelius

“He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe