Monthly Archives: April 2020

Since when can humans be sorted, classified, ordered, and arranged in different classes?  Lower class, working-class, middle-class, and upper class. Just like some sort of a commodity that is sorted and ranked according to its usefulness or monetary value. Stuff can have a monetary value but somehow the value of humans is now also being measured in monetary terms. We even refer to the people we employ as human capital. The higher their income-generating potential the more valuable they are and the more we are prepared to invest in them.

We are obsessed with labelling and fitting people into boxes. Sociologists and economists and other disciplines developed a classification system to help us sort people into these different classes using three criteria, cash, credentials, and culture. First (cash), we need to see your bank balance. For the second (credentials) we need to see your résumé. For the third (culture), we need to determine your preferences and tastes. Once we know all that we are sorted. We know your needs, we can now sell the right stuff to the right people and make more money. It is all about the economy, or as James Carville, Bill Clinton`s strategist famously said: “ It`s the economy, stupid”.

Well, thanks to the global lockdown this economy is now in trouble and it will impact all of us and create havoc with our neatly designed classification system. Some upper- class people will find themselves in the middle-class bracket and many middle-class people will drop to a lower class and people currently indicated as poor will even suffer more. A large scale re-classification will happen. Many of us will find ourselves in a new bracket with a new label.

Do not buy into that! Let`s not allow ourselves to be labelled. Labels hurt. Our value as a human being can never be determined by one’s income bracket. So perhaps the time has come to jump of the sorting table. We are not apples or potatoes or some commodity. We should never use these labels to describe ourselves. We need to  “de-class”. To be neither poor, nor rich, nor middle class. To rather embrace our uniqueness and be in a class of our own.  We are after all unique and beautiful beings that should rather be judged by our character and values than by our income.

Going forward, we will all be confronted with the money issue in some way or the other. Some will lose everything. That does not make you poor, you just lost your stuff and can start afresh.  Some of us will have to downscale and live a more simple life. That is no downgrade and does not make us losers. Some will lose their jobs. A job and a job title does not determine who we are. Jobless is not a title. It is a description of someone who is between jobs.

Perhaps this pandemic wants us to discover a new way of being human. That it is indeed possible to be happy without the trimmings of all our stuff. That it is possible to have very little in terms of material riches but still be spiritually fulfilled. Some people seem to get that. They escaped from the classification table. They are neither lower nor upper class. They are in a class of their own. They seem to know the secret to everyday happiness – gratitude, humbleness, decent work, honesty, grit, grace, patience, wonderment, contentment. They laugh, they love, they play, they dance, they sing and they share and  they fill their days with meaning. Some of them are seriously wealthy, some not, but that seems to be irrelevant.

Perhaps this crisis will help us to discover who we really are and to get rid of all the silly tags and labels we took on.

Every one of us is a living storybook – a book that has a beginning, a plot and an end. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them. When we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story with us. Storytelling is how we try to make sense in an ever-changing world of shifting identities and experiences.

Not only do we all have different stories to share, but we also have a story we create about ourselves. Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this our “narrative identity”. So what is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves at this moment? Here we are, locked down, confined to our homes, and nothing is certain. Someone says this virus is like a pin looking for a balloon to pop, and it is with disbelief, and even horror, that we watch the different balloons popping.

An example of such a balloon is the economic meltdown we are witnessing at the moment. The shops are closed and the streets are empty. Share prices are tumbling. Oil prices today crashed through zero, closing out the day at minus $37 per barrel! It seems that no institution is escaping this – be that health care, education, politics, or religion. Flaws and shortcomings are being laid bare and somewhere amidst all these popping balloons are we, each in our own balloon, watching all of this unfolding. And the more the balloons pop, the more scared and uncertain we become. This is understandable. However, what should really scare us is how we have somehow built our whole life story and even our identity around the existence of these balloons. They came to define us.

We tell ourselves that, if these balloons pop, we are lost. Without them, we are nothing. They provide us with our social standing, our status, our identity. We tell ourselves that our future depends on them. But really, what if all of that was only a bubble that has now been popped? What if we were building our identity on superficial falsities all along? Things like our jobs and our titles, our bank balances and our fancy clothes, the stamps in our passports or our friends in high places, our houses and our cars. They have become our “narrative identity” – the story we tell ourselves of who we are.

According to Dan McAdams, the stories we tell about what is happening to us depends on how we interpret our experiences. There are two kinds of tales we can spin; redemption and contamination stories. With a contamination story, people interpret their lives as going from good to bad. These are the doomsayers. Conversely, there are redemptive stories that tell about the transition from bad to good. People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, are more likely to tell such redemptive stories.

Hopefully our stories about this pandemic will be more the redemptive kind of stories about a world that transitioned from bad to good. We can do it. We can write a new story for the planet. In fact, it seems that we have already started. There are encouraging signs of that. For starters, we seem to becoming humane again. We are starting to see each other again. We are reaching out and are more compassionate. We are becoming more appreciative of the people we share our lives with and are learning not to take things for granted. We are rediscovering that we are loving, and caring human beings by design and that is what our “narrative identity” should be. That is what we should tell ourselves about ourselves. Together we can write a new story of a planet that transitioned from bad to good because we remembered again who we are- loving, caring human beings.  Let’s keep that in mind as the balloons keep popping around us.

House hunting is probably something most of us have experienced. Whether it is buying or letting a place, it is a time consuming and absorbing experience. Often there is an estate agent involved, showing us around the property and pointing out certain flaws and features. The one thing none of us ever want to hear when inspecting a house or apartment that we are considering moving into is that there is a crack in the foundation. That is a deal-breaker. A leaking roof and damp walls we could perhaps handle, but no one in their right mind would buy or live in a property with an unstable foundation.

A house needs a stable foundation. In a way, the Corona virus pandemic, which the world is facing right now, is acting as a building inspector. It reveals and exposes certain flaws and cracks in our lives. The things we have chosen to ignore or not to deal with are now coming to the surface. Relationship issues, career issues, money issues, health issues, all of those are surfacing in some form or another now.

But what this inspector is mainly interested in is the foundation on which we have chosen to build our house. Is it stable? Is it strong? Will it be able to withstand the storms? There is a beautiful story about two men who decided to build a house. The wise man built his house on a solid rock foundation. The rain poured down, the rivers overflowed, and the wind blew hard against the house, but it did not fall, because it was built on rock. The foolish man, in contrast, built his house on sand. The rain poured down, the rivers overflowed, the wind blew hard against the house and it collapsed.

We are currently experiencing one of the fiercest storms in human history. This storm is relentlessly levelling all structures that are not built on a solid foundation. We thought we had it all figured out. Our consumer-focused and greed-driven world, which was based on the attitude that the winner takes it all, had been running like clockwork. And then the storm came and ripped our house apart. Right before our eyes, an economic meltdown is unfolding that our generation has not seen before. Millions of people will probably lose their jobs and many businesses will close down, with dire consequences for millions of people, not only in South Africa but around the world. Suddenly we are being confronted with the stark reality that we may run out of money, which is sending us into a state of panic, anxiety, and fear.

Why? Because money is no longer just a commodity in our lives; it had become our foundation. We were even willing to trade our soul for it. Without money, though, our life collapses. It defined us. We built our house on it. We bought stuff with it and that stuff gave us power and a certain standing in society. It set us apart from the rest. We bought things we did not need, with money we often did not have, to impress people we did not like. It was all a show. We became shallow and superficial. We became arrogant and lost our compassion for each other. We started to exploit people and our natural resources to feed this senseless drive to accumulate as much we can. But now this storm has exposed all of that.

How can we tell what kind of foundation our house is built on? Easy: houses built on sand are built with things that money can buy. It is external. It pleases the ego. Take that away and the house collapses.

A house built on a rock can withstand the strongest storms because it is not focused on the external. It is anchored in love. It looks at life through the window of the soul. It engages fully with life to create abundance and beauty without the need to compete, exploit or harm. Such a house cannot lose anything because the stuff that has real value is something no money can buy.

It is interesting that some people panic and some people are peaceful during this storm. Perhaps it is a matter of our foundations after all.

Lockdown, restricted, confined, small, narrow, tight. None of these concepts sit well with us. Our natural inclination is a yearning to be unlimited, free, unhindered, unhampered, yet, here we are. Locked down, our movement restricted, we are mostly confined to our homes. On a bad day, it may even feel as though we are under house arrest or in prison.

Talking about prisons, according to the latest edition of the World Prison Population List (WPPL), more than 10.35 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world. Since the year 2000, the world prison population has grown by almost 20%, with the total female prison population having increased by 50%, while male prison population has increased by 18%.

At the moment, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of the earth’s population is in ‘prison’ (lockdown). This amounts to 3 billion people.  When I finished school, I started my career as a warden at a medium-sized prison. I ended up spending two years at the Department of Correctional Services, working at different penitentiaries in the country. One of the lasting impressions of that period is a deep sense of appreciation for the freedom of movement and the privilege of choice. I will never forget that sensation of freedom when my shift ended and I could step outside the prison, get into my car and engage with life outside the confines of that building. The sense of relief at not being restricted and controlled and confined to a dull, small living space with little choices.

The other vivid memory I have of that time is the clattering sound of keys against the prison bars in the hallways, as we used those huge keys to lock and unlock the doors of the different cells. Even then, it made me realize what a powerful instrument a key is. It can lock someone in, or set them free. It can restrict, confine and limit, or it can set free, open, and remove limitations.

At the moment, we feel restricted, confined and limited, and we are without a key. Our freedom has been compromised: our freedom of movement, our freedom to go to work, our freedom to visit friends and family, our freedom to play sport. It feels like we have lost our freedom, but in a bigger sense, it is impossible for us to lose our freedom. This is because the key to real freedom is inside us. Always. As the Holocaust survivor and Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl reminds us: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude, to choose one’s own way.”

Let us not allow the situation we find ourselves in to overwhelm us. Let us remember we are always free because we can choose our attitude. We can, therefore, be free, and feel free, even if we are locked in or locked up because the key of choice is on the inside. The only way we can really lose our freedom is if we surrender our power of choice to another person or a situation. That is the secret that kept Victor Frankl alive.

We are faced with a choice of attitude now. We can give our power away and feel trapped, frustrated, agitated and imprisoned, or we can look closely at our situation and recognise that the key to our freedom is always within our reach. It is a matter of choice. You can stay in the cage of frustration, anger, unhappiness, fear, and worry. Or you can set yourself free. Look at the door of the cage. Can you see the key? On the tag, you`ll see the words ‘how do you choose?’ Now turn the key and step out.