Category: Life

  • Maybe tomorrow…

    Maybe tomorrow…

    Just like tomorrow is not guaranteed, neither is our next breath.

    Each moment taken for granted is a moment lost.

    Each loved one taken for granted is a heartache earned.

    Each abandoned resolution made after tasting loss or visiting death’s door is food for the seeds of hypocrisy and self-loathing within.

    The victim mindset turns supporters into enemies, and significant others into options, until what we once cherished is lost, and what we’re left with intensifies our yearning for the past, or for death.

    When the pain of the past overshadows our joy in the present, the future loses its lightness, and our souls succumb to the darkness.

    The shame of admitting failure prevents us from making right what we got wrong.

    All because we were distracted by the harsh criticisms echoed in our narrative in our mind.

    A narrative that convinces us that sincere advisors are criticising our efforts, and those who celebrate the shadow of what we’re capable of are in fact our friends.

    We find what we seek. Shame in the past, purpose in the present, or hope in the future.

    Sadly, most lose themselves to the past, while protecting themselves from embracing the promise that the footie holds, in the process discarding the ones who love them most.

    Who are you discarding because they believe in you more than you believe in yourself?

    Own Your Life.

  • Dream a little dream…

    Dream a little dream…

    In a world of cynics, it’s easy to lose sight of the power that you have to turn your dreams into reality.

    Your efforts become more daunting when faced with an endless barrage of naysayers who only see your potential through their own fears.

    Sincere advisors are often driven by fear, and thus focus on protecting you from their fears of what failure may bring.

    So you slowly give up on your dream as a fantasy, while using its promise as fuel to cope with your reality.

    When you maintain clear boundaries between the two, you convince yourself that dreaming is an irresponsible indulgence of youth, while reality is for adulting.

    Without meaning to, you adopted the fears of those around you, and measured your success by how much you could exceed their expectations within the frame of fear that they painted for you.

    Beauty is lost, endearments become fickle expressions of lightness, and death becomes the morbid milestone by which you gauge how much capacity you will need to keep going.

    All this because you believed others when they disbelieved in you.

    Your dreams are yours to abandon, or yours to claim.

    But if you’re trying to claim a dream that is intricately woven around the presence of another, brace yourself for the anguish that accompanies a lifetime of trying to convince them that achieving your dream is possible, when the events of their life convinced them not to try.

    Dream with abandon, and live with courage.

    If you don’t, the regret will be yours to court, and dreaming will become a cynical taunt that feels like a nightmare.

  • Navigating relationships – 1 of 5

    Navigating relationships – 1 of 5

    When faced with a serious disagreement in their relationship, couples often turn to their own families or friends for advice or support.

    This can be helpful if the people providing such support or advice are mature and objective, rather than loyal above all else.

    Most often, family and friends will support us in our complaints against our partners, hoping to protect us from being taken for granted, or treated badly.

    This is especially true if we come from a family that has very traditional roles that focus on duty and obligation, rather than mutual contribution towards making a home.

    When we are troubled by something that our partner is doing, we must seek to understand why they’re doing that, rather than judging them and rallying support for our position against them.

    If you don’t have such maturity and wisdom in your relationships or your support structures, it’s best to identify up front in the relationship who will be your go-to in such situations.

    Even if it’s a counsellor, coach, or therapist, be sure to find someone that you both trust when times are good, because it’s very difficult to agree on something like this when times are bad.

    If you focus on understanding, being understood will be easier to achieve.

    That’s why we should develop a good understanding with our partner’s support structure so that we can trust them to be objective when we need to figure out such issues in the relationship, rather than slipping into victim mode and presenting ourselves as the neglected or abused one to our own support structures, which often contributes to the break down of the relationship, rather than making it stronger.

    Choose your advisors carefully.



  • Dehumanising struggling humans

    Dehumanising struggling humans

    Trigger warning ⚠

    As destructive as narcissistic behaviour is, it is not the entirety of any person’s being.

    Narcissism is a result of intense insecurity about the self.

    To compensate for this insecurity, the one who is insecure about their worth to others will always focus on hiding their shame, rather than admitting their vulnerability.

    That’s why they’re so quick to preemptively defend themselves or to direct blame at others when things go wrong.

    It’s simply a result of being exhausted from never having been enough, or significant enough to significant others in their lives.

    People often assume that narcissistic behaviour is selfish because people who tend towards such behaviour come from privileged backgrounds, or always got what they wanted.

    That’s part of the problem.

    Having privilege doesn’t mean that we feel heard as human beings. Or that we feel seen.

    Narcissistic behaviour is real, but it’s not something that cannot be changed, nor is it something that is consistent in every sphere of their life.

    The worst thing for narcissism is to be coupled with someone who is needy or also insecure themselves.

    If you’re insecure about who you are, your needs from someone who is struggling with narcissistic insecurities is like a threat to their feelings of inadequacy.

    That’s why an insecure individual will be more affected by narcissistic behaviour than one who is grounded in their self-worth.

    We must stop dehumanising humans by labeling them based on how we experience their behaviour.

    Instead, we must seek to understand, with compassion and empathy.

    But we can only do that if we have it within ourselves, for ourselves.

    You can’t give what you don’t have.

  • Reclaim your worth

    Reclaim your worth

    Peace is most ravaged when we convince ourselves that we were treated badly by others, or by someone we trusted, because we weren’t good enough for them.

    A betrayal of trust, no matter how noble the person, reflects cowardice on their part.

    We only betray the trust that others place in us when we feel burdened by that trust, or we avoid accepting the responsibility that it demands of us.

    Either way, it’s a shortcoming on the part of the betrayer, not the betrayed.

    Sometimes we’re so focused on getting even with those who betrayed our trust that we fail to notice how that fixation distracts us from fulfilling the rights of others, which in itself is also a betrayal of trust.

    Understand the internal struggle of those who treated you badly, so that you will realise that they were simply incapable of being better than that in that moment.

    It may not take away the disappointment or the hurt, but that is part of your humanness.

    When that disappointment overwhelms your joy in life and steals your enthusiasm for the future, it’s no longer because of how someone treated you,it’s because of how you see yourself because of how they treated you.

    It’s that easy to give up your power to influence the outcomes and the happiness that you experience in life.

    You do so by believing that how you were treated by troubled souls is a reflection of your worth.

    That’s simply ingratitude for who you are.

    Misplacing your trust in someone is a mistake made from good intentions.

    Discard the mistake after learning from it. Don’t discard the good that inspired that good intention.

    It always starts with you.

  • Dignity is yours to claim

    Dignity is yours to claim

    There is no shortage of examples of dignity in war zones, poverty or drought stricken areas, or in the midst of heinous terrorist attacks.

    Notice how some people, when faced with soul-destroying realities, are still dignified in how they rise above it?

    If you wait for your aggressor or abuser to treat you with dignity before you find reason to respect yourself, you’re doing life back to front.

    When we expect recognition of our humanness from the world, we’re expecting our tormentor to become our mentor.

    It’s irrational.

    Dignity is not bestowed, it is claimed!

    It is undignified to ask to be treated with dignity because that means that your dignity is dependent on how others treat you.

    We either tolerate being treated with indignity, or we challenge and reject it.

    If we don’t challenge such behaviour from others, we enable them to treat others badly.

    Self-worth is at the core of dignity.

    But self-worth is an outcome of the value that we see in ourselves.

    It’s about how much worth we place on ourselves despite how others may take us for granted.

    When we connect with that value that we hold within, gratitude for who we are, and importantly, gratitude for what we are capable of contributing in good towards others, will establish dignity in our sense of self, and resilience in our response to the trials of life.

    It always starts with you.

    Don’t outsource your dignity to others. They’re not responsible for how you feel about yourself.

    P.S. For the first time in a very long time, I used my own photo for my post, and not one from Adobe Stock. Taken in San Lameer, on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast.

  • To be…

    The oddities of life continue to befuddle me. The restlessness intensifies each day, and the feeling of incompleteness resonates deeper than before. The most bewildering of all is the sense that my chosen path is lacking in fulfilment. But not entirely.

    The nagging of responsibility whines on in the background and creates a backdrop of morbidity to most endeavours, followed by the incessant cacophony of clutter from the ones who live in denial while imposing the consequences of their chosen obliviousness on those who feel responsible to buffer their fall.

    The mediocrity that has grown pervasive is only exceeded in intelligence and brilliance by the creative humour encountered through online reels of mishaps and caricatures of the monotony of humanness when such humanness has been left unattended.

    Cryptic clues leave bread crumbs for the blind, and serve only as a further reinforcement of the isolation in which I find myself. Being part of a greater whole continues to escape me, even though there may be a solitary soul, or two, that consider me a part of their whole.

    That’s the conundrum of life that plagues many. The perception of exclusion because of the absence of understanding. I’m not sure if it is a generosity of spirit on the part of those who embrace without understanding, or is it a desperation for inclusion that drives such acceptance.

    I project on the world’s intentions that which would have been my motivation to act in the way that they do, and it fills me with angst to realise that I am more at odds with life than I ever imagined. To criticise or coach from the sidelines is easy, if there is no demand for offering solutions to accompany your input.

    I demand such solutions of myself, or else I remain silent. Until one comes along and projects their assumptions of intent on me for my silence, or for my volunteering of observations about my own reality, culminating in a vent of venom that they’ve been fermenting in their chest for too long.

    I once set out to be understood, followed by an extended period of seeking to understand instead, only to be followed by a period of being in limbo between the two. Which phase will be the defining outcome of my life remains to be seen.

    To be, to do, or to live. They each seem equally exclusive when the insanity clouds the clarity of the etches of the silver lining that escapes us in our search for rainbows and unicorns. The search is tedious and ever unfulfilling. The trial of awareness is one that prompts action while reminding us of our insignificance against the vastness of the human struggle.

    Perhaps in that is the solace that I should take when feeling compelled to act, or to overcome. Or even to simply exist. I must tame my expectations to be tampered by the realisation of the limited impact that I have on the world around me. Any reach beyond that point is a goal too far, and a distraction too great.

    Hence, the pursuit of leadership is a foolhardy one of self-imposed strife, as we endeavour with seeming sincerity, to alleviate the plights of those who echo the plights within us that we wish one would seek to alleviate. Alas, there are none who look close enough to realise the desperation behind the plea of the uplifter, or the do-gooder, given how desperate each are for another to lighten their load as they journey through the desolation and distractions of a life too brutal to ignore, but too endearing to abandon.

    To be…continued.

  • Own your dream

    Own your dream

    When you find yourself putting your dreams on hold because you’re waiting for others to confirm that it’s a feasible project, or that you’re capable of achieving it, know that it’s not a dream. It’s simply a wish.

    Dreams can either be an indulgence of escapism, or it can be a seed of passion.

    Most use it as escapism to wish away the state of their lives, while believing that they’re oppressed by not having the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

    Unless you are being physically restrained from making that big change, or taking that next step, your dream is yours to claim, or yours to abandon.

    By the way, there’s nothing wrong with escapism, or daydreaming.

    As long as you accept the purpose behind such moments and you don’t use it as reason to blame others for the lack of passion or progress in your life.

    Caution: If you chase your dreams at the expense of important relationships, no matter how much your success will be celebrated by strangers, success will feel hollow.

    So strike a balance between pursuing your dreams while being sure not to shut significant others out of your journey towards achieving it.

    Moderation in everything.

    Remember, once you’re successful, it’s a lot more difficult to determine who is sincere towards you, versus who is using you for your wealth or status.

    So leave the door open for those around you to join you on your journey when they’re ready, but don’t stand at the doorway waiting for them before you pass through it.

    Success is most enjoyed when we can share it with those we love. Otherwise, we’ll find it at our is never enough as we continue to seek fulfilment in achieving more, because we have no joy in what has already been achieved.