Dear Roomful Teenage Girls and Young Adult Women:

There’s much I’d like to say. I know people hear and learn according to readiness for both. Sometimes learning requires pain, even desperation. It always requires humility. It won’t surprise me if you think I have nothing to teach you. Either way, here goes:

You don’t NEED a man. If you WANT one, and don’t NEED one, you will be amazed at the different quality of men you will meet. Desperation emits messages unhealthy men find very attractive.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that I think you should not date or pursue marriage. I want you to know you are ENOUGH already, you don’t need a man to help you be something that you cannot already be on your own. Reject the term “other half” or “better half” – it’s nonsense. You are not a “half” waiting for some man to be made whole!

When the time is right, seek a MUTUAL and EQUAL and RESPECTFUL relationship. It will challenge, sharpen, and, yes, “improve” you. It’s got to be all three from the outset. You can’t easily import them into a relationship once it has started.

Don’t chase anyone for anything. Chase only a fine education.

May we seek and desire love, in other words, the Highest Good both for ourselves and for others, intimates and strangers alike. 

Consequently, desire power over no one but over yourself which, even then, will be surprisingly limited. Remind yourself that you are more than meets the eye and are powerfully shaped by generations of enriching and detracting pressures which exert degrees of power over you and which is probably enough to deal with without trying to manage another.

When you perceive others conferring power upon you, as kindly as possible, draw attention to it and suggest their “gift” is misplaced. While flattering, it’s unlikely to be helpful in the long term to anyone. 

When you perceive yourself to be conferring power upon another, even an intimate or trusted friend, be on alert. Assess what it is you are seeking from this inordinate connection or avoiding within yourself such conferring is necessary. As comfortable as it may seem it’s unlikely to be helpful in the long term to anyone. 

May we allow the words of Rev. Msimangu in Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” to be an encouragement: 

“But there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.”

You may have noticed there are about 7 layers beneath the situations – the problems, anti-social behaviors, joys, conflicts, kindnesses, dilemmas, addictions, attractions, and much more – churning within you and within the people with whom you live and those whom you meet everyday.

A less-complex linear world may be convenient but human dynamics escape mere “cause and effect.”

We are much more (thankfully) than billiard balls bumping into each other.

“Johnny doesn’t want to go to school” followed by “What’s ‘wrong’ with Johnny?” or “What’s ‘wrong’ with the teacher or school?” is linear thinking.

Johnny may want to stay home from school to protect mom from dad or dad from mom and not even know it. Johnny may prefer home to school because he recognizes rejection from children of a different socio-economic group than he enjoys or endures. Johnny may well be unaware of the reasons for the anxiety he feels when leaving for school and, if family members who had similar feelings about schooling generations before he was conceived, were honest, Johnny may realize he’s from a long line of school-resistent family members.

Yes, your behavior is at least as complex as my fictional Johnny’s behavior.

Appreciating the multiple levels underlying complex human behaviors takes empathy, patience and kindness.

For an observer lacking empathy we are all not much more than the results of mere cause and effect, billiard balls knocking into each other.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018ntm

The constant back and forth between and among people over days and months and years – the actions, the looks, sighs, what’s assumed, the smiles and the frowns – and so much more, reinforce the fact that we teach each other how to treat each other. Those who know us intimately can read and mis-read us, and even the mis-readings become part of the ongoing dialogue and the ongoing mutual training.

It is the fact that these patterns are so known and so often repeated that makes change for improvements hard for all parties concerned.

When relationships are mutual and respectful it is these qualities that allow for change.

If you or I see and shift in the manner a person whom we know well is responding to us and others, and the relationship is sound and secure, you and I embrace the shift, we know this person whom we love and respect is at liberty to try all the shifts and changes he or she wants. 

As life progresses and growth occurs, needs and wants, and people, change.

In respectful relationships we get out of each other’s way. 

We step aside.

We watch with wonder and curiosity when the people we love embrace new ideas and explore new and different ways of living and offer love, support, and applause.

Packing for the journey, be it a short or extended, preparation pays off. 

Through contemplation (reading, prayer, meditation) build your reserves of kindness, goodness and patience. While you are at it, find Grace for yourself and for others then, with humility, venture out with courage. You’re topped up with every good thing and ready to enrich the world around you. 

Keep I mind that everyone has a story to tell. If you have the patience and listen you may make someone’s day. Being willing to listen will distinguish you from the bulk of humanity who seem committed to wanting to talk. I’d suggest that your willingness to listen may indeed save someone’s life. I know this to be true.

Increase your awareness. There will always be people with a transactional approach to life. Any kindness, special favors, displays of hospitality you experience from them is a down payment on what they want from you in the future. This is neither good or bad, it is simply how some operate. As long as we understand these differences among people all will be well. 

I find it helpful – although not foolproof – to have a mantra for the day like “I will love, I will listen, I will learn” and it colours my lenses enough to keep me out of trouble.

[The Mercury — Monday, February 13, 2023]

All lyrics and music by Thulani Smith.

“You can’t drive a ten-ton truck over a one-ton bridge,” my dad would say, or at least I think it was dad. 

Perhaps it was one of my many sage uncles. 

The literal meaning was obvious but it was always meant in the context of relationships. 

A relationship has to have resilience and have experienced much before it can take the heaviness that sometimes must flow between and among people.

My sons can hit me with any news or questions when necessary. We have decades of love and struggle, joys and failures and yeses and maybes and absolutely nots and I love you-s that have flowed among us. Our relationships have muscle. They are toned and exercised, and muscle my sons trust. It’s muscle I trust. They can bring a 10-ton truck over the bridge and the fifty-ton bridge we have built together over years and years of daily living will sustain the weight. We each know this to be true – even if we have never said it – there’s an understanding of love and commitment among us, maintained and repaired in “real time” with every act of kindness and forgiveness and show of mercy and empathy and compassion and understanding.

The same privileges are mutually afforded and enjoyed with my family and members of my family-of-choice and with men and women all of whom already know it even if it’s never articulated.

Neglected relationships result in untrustworthy or faulty bridges.

Build, repair your bridges – if necessary – before you approach another with your 10-ton message, your demand, complaint or request.

[The KZN Mercury, Friday February 10, 2023]

It’s a Saturday morning. 

I’m 11. 

As I have done for years, I am riding my bike on the gravel entrance to E. W. G. Smith, General Dealer, my dad’s Blackburn Road grocery shop.

A car eases alongside me and the driver leans out of the open car window and asks me directions to Parkhill Soccer Club. I know where it is but …. but… but everything I know sticks in my head. Words fail. My arms twitch. My neck stretches. Nothing. Not a sound will come out of me but for gasps and whelps. Then, I am choking on partial words which turn to monosyllabic squeaks and squawks which shotgun out of me. 

I turn my bike to look elsewhere and point down the road. 

The driver mimics my sounds, movements, laughs and points at me. He fake-chokes. He spits, jerks his head, playing to his audience, a car full of laughing adults. They move their arms, spit, copy my rapid repetitions and the driver shifts gears and the car tires rip the gravel and my mockers are gone.

I went inside the house and inside myself. I am debilitated, for days I want to hide in shame. 

I enter days of dark silence, moodiness, and humiliation. 

I can’t shake this stutter or the shame. 

The memory of trying to give directions to a place I knew so well repeatedly plays in my head and humiliation washes over me and I am convinced the men and women in the car are sure they met an idiot.

Go easy on children who stutter, please.

[The KZN Mercury / Thursday February 9, 2023]

Grief is a crazy companion, sometimes comforting, even refreshing.

Then, it will rip you apart.

When preoccupied, it can go away briefly, go into hiding and you can live, ever so briefly, as if you have never lost anyone or anything.

Then, out of nowhere, it will hit like a ton of bricks, playing its twisted game of hide-and-seek.

Believe it or not, grief has your best interests at heart.

It will do its work to revive yours, as battered and broken as your heart may be.

Let grief do its work as best you are able: its painful, beautiful, inner work. Allow it free-range. Full access. As it does its slow, deliberate, detailed work, you will continue to become even more beautiful than you already are.

That’s what it does: it turns hurting people into human agents of incredible understanding and grace – if you let it.

Your heart may be broken.

Your life may feel hopeless, but grief will ultimately deliver you to a hopeful destination and hope and courage will be yours again.

If you let it.

Try to get out of grief’s way. Allow silence. Allow yourself stop-and-think time. Allow yourself to remember. Play the music that may be painful to hear. Go to the places you are avoiding. Look at pictures, play the saved voicemails.

Watch the home movies.

Do these things when you are ready to do them.

You will know better than anyone when you are ready.

You may fall apart at first when you venture into the things you have been avoiding, but it is all part of getting ready to fall together.

Allow yourself speak-to-a-trusted-friend time.

Cry, write, read. Be angry if necessary.

Grief labors long over its ever-incomplete healing work.

Accommodation is possible. A full life is possible. But, keep in mind, the vacuum left by some loss is never filled, some losses are beyond healing.

It is natural to want to rush grief and to want all pain to be gone.

Who cannot want pain to be gone?

But, it is a crazy and unruly companion.

Grief breaks out at the most unexpected times.

Rushing grief, hurrying its work, will lodge pain even deeper into the soul only to later manifest as some unwanted reaction or unfamiliar emotion.

No matter how recent or distant your loss, welcome the tears.

Let grief’s first agents, first responders, flow.

“Time heals,” clangs the cliche.

Time doesn’t heal, not usually, not by itself. Time is time.

Time passed is not grief diminished.

There are some losses that are never “healed.”

Some never find “closure.”

This does not mean survivors cannot live full, productive, beautiful lives.

Warmth, two listening ears, and hot cups of tea accompanied by face-to-face-no-phones hours may be the most powerful gifts a person can offer one who has suffered.

It is ridiculous to approach a grieving person with a step-by-step generic packaged get-over-your-grief formula.

“What shall I do with this grief?” she asked, having lost so much, one thing on top of another, more than enough loss for many in a lifetime.

You shall sit with it.

Embrace it.

As difficult as that may sound, you will let it do its work.

“What shall I do with the pain, the gaping hole in my chest, a wound in my soul, my very being?” he asks after losing his life-partner.

You will go into survival-mode. Operate on automatic.

Auto-pilot.

Then, you will arrange your life around it, at least for a while.

“But, I do not want this, the anguish, this disorientation.”

Nobody does.

It is always an uninvited guest.

Crazy, unruly grief will do its work and you will emerge as gold.

You will know remarkable intuition and offer presence to others in ways now unimagined despite it being a path that you’d never have chosen.

The power of grief should never be downplayed or underestimated.

Grief is a private journey.

Don’t mess with it, not in yourself or in others.

It’s a crazy, unruly, companion.