Every week I try to pen something meaningful, something worthy of being read, reflected on, maybe even carried into someone’s everyday life. But this week, the words felt far away. My body has been wrestling with a health challenge, and my spirit felt tired. I caught myself thinking, “Nothing interesting is happening in my life.”
Yet a scroll through social media told a very different story: everyone else seemed to be thriving, celebrating, achieving, travelling, living their best lives. If I chose to believe everything online, I would easily conclude that my life is the only quiet, unremarkable one.
But of course, that’s not the truth. And when the world feels loud or overwhelming, sometimes the quiet is where the real writing begins. On Sunday, the world marked the Day of the Volunteer. Today is a day of remembrance for those caught in genocide and conflict. And on the 10th of December, we will again mark International Human Rights Day. Suddenly my pen knew exactly where it wanted to go.
Why do we have to be reminded year after year of things we should already be living? Human dignity. Compassion. Peace. The sacred duty we carry toward one another. Why have these become “days,” and not habits? Because not making human dignity a habit, we live lives in the pain of being unseen
There is one place that has never made it onto my bucket list: New York City. Whenever I watch a film or documentary set there, I’m struck by the pace, not the fast pace of business, but the fast pace of disconnection. People walk past one another like shadows: faceless, nameless, untouched by the presence of the other. Then my mind wanders to the packed streets of Hong Kong, the slums of India, and the informal settlements scattered across South Africa. You begin to notice a heart-breaking pattern, people who feel invisible. The world is riddled with lives invisible. People who carry their humanity quietly because the world does not pause long enough to notice it.
There is nothing as painful to the human soul as being unseen.
Being overlooked.
Being treated as though you don’t matter.
Maybe that’s why Human Rights Day and all these other commemorative days exist: not to remind us of policies and declarations, but to remind us to look again at the person standing next to us, at the life crossing our path, at the human being behind the story.
This week I sat with a close friend of mine. He recently lost someone, his former supervisor/boss; a man who had made his working life incredibly difficult for many years. So many relationships around him fractured because of this one individual’s influence. Friendships collapsed. Confidence eroded. He walked through life with one wing clipped, wondering if something was wrong with him. There’s a particular kind of pain that comes from being rejected or misrepresented. From hearing lies spoken as truth. From feeling like you don’t belong to anyone or anywhere.
That phrase “to be someone’s person” is one of the few beautiful things social media has given us. There is something sacred in knowing you have a place at someone’s table. That you are held in someone’s heart.
And there is something deeply devastating about losing that seat. Of loosing the seat at the table. I told my friend that I knew that pain intimately. Years ago, during my divorce, my so-called friends chose sides. And the one they chose was not the one with the truth — it was the one with the resources. I found myself on the outside of the life I once belonged to. Every time I saw their smiling faces on social media years later, something inside me tightened.
Not because I wanted to go back.
Not because I still held the pain.
But because looking in the rear-view mirror still reminds you of the wound that was once there.
We all have a rear-view mirror like that, a moment, a relationship, a loss that taught us what it feels like to be discarded.
While my friend and I were talking, he received the message, the man who had caused him so much anguish had passed away. We opened a bottle of wine and sat with the news. First came the relief — that instinctive feeling of “I’m finally free.”
But the relief lasted only a moment. Then came the sorrow. Because no matter how painful someone has been, death levels everything. The life that tormented you is still a life. A soul. A story. And that was when the truth burst open between us:
It does not matter how people feel about you. What matters is the kind of life you lived and the impact you left on humanity. Because all life matters.
This man, who had once controlled so much of my friend’s life, no longer had power. He lay on a cold slab in a morgue, while we sat sipping wine, alive, breathing, free. The irony was overwhelming. The lesson was sobering.
Who are we to think we have the right to make another person’s life unbearable?
Who are we to act superior, arrogant, cruel?
Who are we to wield power like a weapon?
Life is as fragile as the grapes in our wine. One day they bask in the sun; the next they are crushed into fermentation. Human beings are just as fragile, just as temporary, just as dependent on grace. So why do we waste our limited time hating, hurting, gossiping, destroying reputations, excluding others, hoarding status?
Why do we forget to love?
There is a fable about a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion begs the frog to carry him across the river, promising he will not sting him. Halfway across, he does exactly that.
“Why?” the frog gasps. “Now we will both die.”
The scorpion replies, “Because it is in my nature.”
I often think about this story when I see the cruelty people inflict on one another ; at work, in families, in communities, in politics. Some people sting because they haven’t yet learned another way. Some sting because pain is all they have ever known. Some sting because they believe superiority is safety.
But we are not scorpions.
We are human.
And humanity is a choice. And we all want the same basic things. If you strip us down to our core, we all want the exact same things:
- To be loved
- To be safe
- To be seen
- To belong
- To have purpose
- To know our life matters
Our growth, our healing, and our happiness are tied to one another. Your cruelty affects someone else’s mental health. Your kindness may be the one thing that keeps someone going.
We forget how intertwined we are. And we forget that we have the capacity for both immense kindness and unspeakable cruelty. Every day, in everything we do, we are choosing who we are becoming.
South Africa needs a reset a spiritual, social, and moral reset. We need to remember why this country was rebuilt in the first place: reconciliation, dignity, equality, freedom.
Greed, corruption, power hunger and division have taken us so far from our founding vision that we barely recognize ourselves.
But renewal is possible.
Forgiveness is possible.
Reconciliation is possible.
I grew up in community life, and at the entrance of the community grounds there was a board that read:
Be reconciled / Mother with Father
Husband with Wife / Brother with Sister
Sister with Brother / Believer with Believer
In Him.
It was simple.
It was profound.
And it was a daily reminder that none of us are perfect, but all of us are responsible to one another. Because reconciliation isn’t an event. It is a posture of heart. It is a way of living
So today, I honour my friend who chose compassion over resentment. He went to visit the man who had wounded him not because the man deserved it, but because he deserved peace. In forgiving him, he freed himself.
South Africa needs to learn from that act.
We need to put down our baggage the resentment, the divisions, the stereotypes, the hunger for superiority. We need to stop treating people as objects to be used or obstacles to be removed. We need to see the person in front of us as human, nothing more, nothing less.
Because at the end of the day, that is all any of us are: human.
Fragile.
Flawed.
Beautiful.
Beloved.
And if we remembered that truly remembered we might just save our country, one person at a time.
“The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane.” – Mahatma Gandhi.
