Triumph of hope over experience
EVEN in truly horrible times, the human spirit needs hope as much as lungs need oxygen.
It’s remarkable how, even if you are running out of faith, health, belief in your fellow man, failing someone or something, a tiny ember of hope can spark the impetus to pick yourself up and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Experience, good or bad, cannot be bought, copied or shared. It is yours alone, but it is learned and can take a lifetime to gather.
Many decades ago, I started, but never earned a BA in journalism via Unisa. At the time, I was getting the most wonderful, broad, all-encompassing experience you can get in any career – a hands-on, learn-to-doeverything in every department and every job.
This encompassed, among many other things, reception; selling advertising (I was rubbish); designing and making up ads with wax, photographic paper and sharp box-cutters, a box of plaster nearby for us beginners; writing stories on old typewriters and getting red-pen-filled scrunched-up balls of my prose thrown in my direction by an editor insisting it be redone. Then (my secret favourite) pasting waxbacked strips of paper on grids which were photographed, and the plates were washed and turned your hands (and your plasters) blue until the next edition, and it started all over.
The exams started on production day, and so that never happened.
But what did happen was I was introduced to an extraordinary little book. I thought I deserved extra credits just for learning the title: Existential Phenomenology and the World of Ordinary Experience: An Introduction by Paul T Brockelman.
Sadly, it seems to be lost amid my thousands of books, but it’s a complex philosophy that basically says two or more people in the exact same situation, or looking at the same thing, will experience it differently. The essence of that thing or action will be interpreted in light of the observer’s life experiences. It’s very complicated, and I, um, hope there’s not an academic lurking to leap on my lean layman’s knowledge.
But hope, in spite of experience which may tell you otherwise, no matter how you look at it, is also an essential survival skill that cannot be taught. It is intrinsic to humans, and it takes some epic calamity to deplete the supply.
Until it is drained, every day comes with the hope that things will improve.
Some hopes are seemingly small: the sun will shine; the birds nesting in your tree will finally reveal their chicks; you’ll see fresh leaves budding in your garden; you’ll hear from a friend you may have lost contact with. These are the little things that put a smile in your heart.
Then there are the big ones: today, I’ll find a job; today, I’ll find the love of my life; today, there will be no more terrible news of another person you love getting ill or dying. Eskom won’t suddenly announce stage 4 blackouts.
Some are life-changing: I’ll get better; my child will find a donor; we’ll be together tonight, safe around the dinner table. It’s our superpower: the triumph of hope over experience. Cling to it with all your might.
BY TUESDAY, the counting will be nearly over and we will have a very good idea about who should be running our municipalities for the next five years – or maybe not. The run-up to these elections has been one of the shortest in the history of a democratic South Africa because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s a mercy. We have been spared too many empty promises by politicians emerging from the shadows to insincerely press the flesh.
But it’s also saved lives, because in a country such as ours with the levels of unemployment and inequality that we have, a council seat is an immediate guarantee of some sort of better life for the next five years, which is why our political system is
WHAT do you do when someone you love and respect is accused of the cardinal sins of our time – racism and gender based violence?
Do you defend them and tell the world about the person you know or do you look at the allegations objectively to determine a conclusion? Do you blindly believe the accuser, the victim, no matter what?
The veteran journalist and cricket writer Lungani Zama found himself having to explain his friend, the Proteas batsman wicket keeper, Quinton de Kock, whom many South Africans now believe is a racist. This, for his refusal to take the knee when Cricket South Africa made it mandatory at the T20 World Cup currently under way in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
It is understood De Kock and other players only found out about the directive on the bus on their way to the ground ahead of their match against the West Indies on Tuesday. Until now the stance of the senior men’s side has been for each individual to decide their gesture in the fight against racism – the black players bar none have all taken the knee whilst some white players have raised a fist and others have stood to attention when the national anthem is played. The only white player who has taken the knee from the get-go was Rassie van der Dussen.
By Cricket South Africa’s own admission, after well over a year of discussions the Proteas were unable to reach consensus on the issue. When the team faced Australia last Saturday, the administrators could no longer stomach what they saw as a display of disunity – the optics were simply no longer tolerable. And so the board issued an edict that forthwith all the