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Why lose your sleep? It always works out eventually…

Written by Bongeka
2 Comments

One Sunday afternoon I was cosy in bed and having a really great conversation over the phone with a friend of mine. I had my laptop on my lap and my external hard drive connected to my laptop. We were on the phone for almost an hour and my phone battery became very low. Since I didn’t want to end our great conversation, I reached for my charger in my bag next to my bed but as I was reaching for my charger, my laptop slipped to the floor and my external hard-drive flung and smashed my screen. Now me being Zulu I exclaimed “hawe ma” which is an exaggeration in my language and just simply means “oh my goodness”

My friend on the line asked what’s wrong. I told him and he simply said with great calmness, “you know it’s going to be alright right” I said yeah rolling my eyes and thought to myself “easy for you to say”. But actually he was right. When I prayed that night I thought to myself life is really interesting, the most unexpected things can just happen to you.

I began asking myself in the midst of my panic should I really lose my sleep over this? Now my panic was not me necessarily overreacting, but it was born out of the fact that this was my work laptop and this unfortunate accident happened over the weekend and we all know how people at work love to talk!

The next day I went to our IT department and they quickly offered a solution that calmed my nerves down. My laptop screen took about 10 days to get fixed due to internal processes that had to be followed. But thankfully during those 10 days I connected my laptop to an external monitor and I managed to do all that was required of me that week.

My enjoy life tip is ,life is so unpredictable. Your brand new car that you just purchased can get bumped by another car; your favourite item of clothing can get torn; you may make a bad decision in your business or job, the list of “blunders” is endless.

But truth is you never stay in the same situation forever! Eventually insurance will fix that car; you will buy new clothes and you will eventually come to the right decision. Don’t lose your joy over something that will change eventually…as some old wise men once said “…and this too shall pass”

Life,

Desperation gives birth to Einstein

Written by Bongeka
3 Comments

I have this habit of drinking hot water with lemon and honey in the morning and evening before I head to bed. A couple of nights ago as I was about to read my book and wanted to make myself a cup with the above ingredients, I realised that I had run out of lemons and there was also just a small amount of honey left that I struggled to even get out through the opening.

But since my throat was in dire need of a soothing and I didn’t just want to drink the hot water by itself, I decided to cut the honey container with a knife in the middle so that I could open and use a teaspoon to draw out what was left. I started to laugh at myself for doing this in fact I said “really Bongeka, now this is desperation at its highest” In this moment I realised something and this brought back many childhood memories.

We have this amazing ability as human beings to problem solve and find innovative ways of making things work when faced with an “unfavourable” or “desperate” situation. The most classic example I can think of was during my early years growing up in the township. I recall that many of our parents couldn’t afford to buy us fancy board games, dolls, car toys etc…and how did we respond to that? Well since every child has this innate need to “play” we invented stuff. I think about the innovative games we had; I think about the cars our brothers invented using wires that were lying around.

My big brother went as far as developing our very own “monopoly board game”. We had been inducted to this wonderful game when we went to visit our cousin who was an only child and we were hooked! Now when we got home we simply could not stop talking about this amazing game we had played. So my brother decided since mummy and daddy can’t buy it for us, he will make one.

He simply took a flat piece of an old wardrobe cupboard, used mum’s pen markers to create the icons on the board; we found some plastic stuff lying around that we used as icons and voilà our very own monopoly.

My enjoy life tip is this- even in the face of lack we can still create something or find a way to make something work. How many of us have used a shoe to hit a nail in instead of a hammer? So my challenge to you is, maybe you have been trying to find a solution to solve a business, school,  relationship, career or ministry problem and you have been attempting tried and tested conventional methods. But I’m saying maybe take a step back and perhaps what you really looking for is a very unconventional way of solving that issue!

Critical thinking, ,