Be careful when you inflict evil upon South Africans. They will almost always unite across every conceivable barrier and return your evil with graciousness and kindness that will sizzle the goals of your dark motives.

Watch out when “Boer maak a plan” and “Ubuntu” combine. The tenacious combination that will explode into widespread love and success. These two concepts (inventiveness under pressure and working together for the communal good) come from extremes, sometimes enemies, but will unite and come for you and accost you with so much kindness that you will come to regret your unimaginative evil (it always is) and wish you’d seen what they already know: good defeats evil every time.

The majority of South Africans are unusual that way, they go into retreat after an attack but it should not be confused with defeat. They are planning, uniting, then they will share, serve, clean, sing, pray and dance in the streets and grace will prevail.

Choirs will sing in the most devastated areas. Meals will be prepared for the very people who destroyed and looted. There’ll be widespread repentance and resilient love will emerge from this horrible circumstance. You watch, this looting and destruction, will turn into love and rebuilding and the plans of the disruptors will be successfully derailed.

Fall on your knees: you may have noticed with a sigh of relief or an edge of frustration you are one of a kind. There is no one quite like you, not even close. Your profile may reveal familial similarities but you are unique and you know it.

You draw connections, see parallels in ways you know are a little crazy. Words, music, aromas, one-liners, associate across decades and you resort to momentary introspective giggles because sharing whatever you just thought or saw or felt would take too long to explain and it would be meaningless to anyone else breathing.

On top of that your head is full of what ifs, not regrets, but possibilities, hopes, aspirations. Periodically you think you’re going to burst with ideas, love, passion, when you sneak a glimpse of how beautiful the people in your life really are and how much talent they ferry around everyday.

There are creeping regrets. You have to fight them off like an invasive species. But, truth is, they earned their place but some have overstayed their welcome.

Fall on your knees in thanksgiving. There is only one of you.

In times of disruption and stress the really important things become vividly clear and what is not has a way of dropping from our individual and group awareness. 

The new and expensive kitchen countertops become what they ought to be, a backdrop to vital conversations. The new car, the one you wanted to keep spotless, becomes a means to ferry food to neighbors. The Wifi speed ceases to be about gaming or Netflix, but a means to efficiently update family and friends around the world about your safety and wellbeing.

Going to school, being present in a classroom, having a teacher live in front of your children becomes a pleasurable thought, something for which your children and you may now ache. 

The Spar sign you spy on the way to search for a tank of petrol is a warm reminder of how things used to be, just a few days ago.

But, things will come together. Order will be restored. Good outweighs evil with surprising regularity all throughout history.Rebuild, replace, restore; restore, replace, rebuild. Good outweighs evil with surprising regularity all throughout history.

I’m sure you’re feeling anxious today. If not anxious for yourself, perhaps for your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. You’re worried about what’s happening today and what will happen in the future if all this chaos can occur today. Perhaps you’re feeling fearful today, wondering if normalcy will ever be restored, if widespread civil decency will ever once more prevail.

The thought and the question you find hard to expel may be “will things ever return to order?” I’m sure you’ve wondered how a place with such natural beauty of sea, clear skies, subtropical plants and beauty, and, more often than not, such incredible weather, can be accosted with such random and indiscriminate horror.

I will tell you, dear reader, that from my safe distance it’s understandably easy for you to dismiss my expressions of empathy and want to see through them.

Truth is I’ve had a sleepless night (almost, at least). There is a clinical definition for the guilt I’m feeling from this safe distance while family and friends and readers are threatened and, yes, I’m feeling it and feeling it powerfully.

May grace be yours in the midst of all you are having to endure.

A significant problem with disdain, contempt, rejection, or downright hate, is that it impacts the source more than it (usually) does the victim.

If you (or I, of course) harbor negative thoughts and feelings toward a former spouse, in-laws, parents, or neighbors, anyone for that matter, we poison our own wells. We damage ourselves, and the self-damage usually outshines the impact on our victims.

Hate (or contempt or disdain – people usually like to avoid the word hate with “softer” terms) even though that’s what it is:

• Poisons our view on the world and on all other people, even those we love.

• Even the beautiful things and beautiful experiences are contaminated if we harbor hate for even one person.

• Hate has trouble being contained and its power infects everything we do and see and experience.

• Hate, like all viruses, has no boundaries, and so it indiscriminately invades and spoils even where it’s uninvited.

• Makes us cynical and we become cynical for so long it becomes a way of life, making us contemptuous of those who are hopeful and of those who express optimism.

Love, forgiveness, grace, and goodness are better than hate – yet hate has quite a following.

Grace, goodness, kindness will lift our spirits and open a world of fresh and wonderful possibilities.

Love is courageous and creative. It’s always the best option.

Parenting has tried very hard to teach me a few valuable lessons. Although sometimes a slow learner, and some crucial principles have demanded refresher courses, I think the lessons are transferable to all relationships:

• Identifying and stopping when I’m projecting my history, fears, frailties, failures and temptations onto their motives and behaviors.

• Knowing when to stop talking, when words, shared thoughts and ideas, have turned into chasing, demanding, hunting and “suggestions” have transformed into strong-arm tactics.

• Knowing when my actions, as loving as they may appear, promote laziness or unnecessary dependence.

• Knowing when to stop thinking, anticipating for each of my sons when they are quite capable of planning and organizing themselves and understanding that if they are not, my doing it for them is hardly helpful if they are to ever develop these very necessary skills.

• Knowing anxiety and love are not the same thing and are easily, often painfully confused as they can feel so much alike. 

• Parenting ends; while I will always be their dad, they are no longer little boys who need oversight and my watchful eye. They are men in their own right, both fully capable of life with me and without me. If this is not so, I have truly failed as a dad, and they, as men.

It fascinates me that we often know so little about each other and how little time we take to try to discover each other. 

Occasionally I will play the piano. 

Someone where I live, will tell me they didn’t know I played. 

When I report that amongst other places, I played topless in a flowery skirt for a lua band in Hawaii they are usually taken aback. Sometimes I’ll add that at 12 I played for a stripper named Syringa who danced with a snake.

This is what I mean. There are whole volumes of our lives that others don’t know about and we’d all be enriched (perhaps) if we took the time to find out. We are all more than we can see.

I visited a man in a care facility a while back and met a friend of his who was also visiting. All I saw about him was that he was tall, very tall. I took no time to find out anything about him. I recalled his name because when we both left the care facility the waves and cheers he got from other residents made it clear he was well known.

I was rather embarrassed when I got home and googled him.

This gracious man was a basketball star of national significance and I didn’t even know he played.

“Leave things – parks, campsites, picnic areas, beaches, national parks – better than you found them” is, for obvious reasons, a widely used, helpful mantra.

When applied, everyone benefits.

The communal or public facilities are left clear of litter, things are straightened out, tidied, to benefit those who will next use it. Those departing are better off for having increased awareness of the needs of others, even the needs of strangers.

It becomes a way of thinking, a lens through which we see the world, all it offers, and what we have to offer it.  Exercising such awareness and thoughtfulness leaves us all better off and offers us all a chance to grow.  

I think this principle applies also to people, to all encounters, casual to intimate.

Every encounter can be a positive one. Yes. It can. Even with that very difficult neighbor, that surly in-law, that rude guy at the post office. Your Ex.

You can make it so by how you leave it, how you clean up after yourself, how you take care of who you are and how you respond in the encounters. It’s not that I think everyone needs some kind of fixing but we can leave every encounter with grace, kindness, with an exchange that’s encouraging, even the most difficult of encounters.

I hope you will learn the power of a strong “yes” and a firm “no.”

May you learn to say YES to opportunities even if they involve risk or if they involve venturing into the unknown, learning new things, and breaking unhelpful habits. May you say YES especially if the opportunities involve meeting new people. May you say YES to opportunities to travel, to serve, and to build and to assist in mending broken places. May you say YES to exploring new ideas. May you say YES when you encounter opportunities to offer hospitality.

May you say NO to toxic secrets, to behavior that judges or excludes others. May you say NO to religious teachings that limit your capacity for generosity and freedom. May you say NO to anything that will delay your formal education no matter how appealing or adventurous the idea may be. May you say NO to those who disrespect you or encourage you to treat the adults around you with anything less than utmost respect and close-to-perfectly good manners. May you say NO to those who dismiss your ideas and who treat you as a means toward their disclosed or undisclosed ends.

“Is every intimate relationship worth fighting for? How do you know when to throw in the towel?” 

After much first-hand experience of couples beating incredible odds (addictions, violence, serial infidelity) to revitalize devastated relationships I’m going to say YES. It is probably worth the fight. There are some essential pointers that suggest ending it may be inevitable.

Both people have to be almost equally in the battle. “Almost” because one person is inevitably more motivated than the other. It just cannot stay that way if it’s to survive and thrive. Both people have to acknowledge individual roles in the breakdown. I have no urge to “blame the victim” but it takes at least two to tangle (and tango).

Both people have to acknowledge a commitment to “on-going” truth. I don’t believe every detail of an infidelity ought be divulged but I do believe a couple can commit to “truth-from-here-on” agreement. Affairs (emotional, sexual, soul-mates-only) must end if the couple is to survive and thrive. Both people have to be willing to learn to HEAR the other person – no matter how long or painful the process. No listening; no love.