On the 27th of July, I turned 41years of age. Don't look shocked, I know I have this beautiful face and gorgeous figure that makes me look like I am 30 but its true that I am 41years old now. Anyway, in celebration of my birthday, I took two weeks away from the madding crowd to make a date with myself and ponder and reflect about life and what it has taught me. It was an exciting interlude in which I first pampered myself in the way that makes me feel good and then had that appendicitis operation I had been dreading to have for weeks and then read through the journals I wrote over the years, as I recuperated from the operation. As I read through the journals which I started writing when I was 10 years old, my life started to rewind in front of me and I enjoyed seeing how life moulded me into the woman that I am today and it occurred to me that life is actually very interesting and good.
Let me randomly share with you the highlights of my life journals that I found interesting as I read them recently when I turned 41. What particularly struck me was the descriptions I gave of people when I first met them and how different to those descriptions the people turned out to be after getting to know them better. One of the writings in my journal that I found interesting and which I think is worth mentioning is the description of my ex-husband that I wrote in 1989 when I first met him. How his first impression on me turned out to be totally different from the man whom I eventually shared my life with briefly taught me that first impressions of people should not be trusted. Appearances and reality usually diverge dear readers, that is one of the wisdoms that life has taught me. For 41 years now I have been studying my fellow men and yet there still remains some mystery about the human species, I do not know everything that has to be known about them. I certainly hesitate to engage a maid on her face, and yet I suppose it is on the face that for the most part humans judge the persons they meet. We draw our conclusions from the shape of the jaw, the look in the eyes, the contour of the mouth. I wonder if we are more often right than wrong. Why novels and plays are so often untrue to life is because their authors, perhaps of necessity, make their characters so perfect and fitting to the role they play. They can not afford to make them self-contradictory, for then the novel or play becomes incomprehensible. Yet self-contradictory is what most humans are. We are a haphazard bundle of inconsistent qualities. The mixture of incongruities that make up a human being defy logic sometimes. I now disagree when people tell me that their first impressions of a person are always right, I think they must have small insight or great vanity. For my own part I find that the longer I know people the more I know the type of human beings that they are. So my advice to you dear readers is to take a very long time to get to know the true character of a person and never to judge a person by the first impression they give you.
As I read through my journals I realised that all the turning points in my life started with a simple thought that I implemented which then resulted in life-changing transformations. Allow me to share with you some of the simple thoughts that resulted in transitions in my own life.
1. Facing the winds of life
It was in 1994 and I had finally managed to separate from my abusive, alcoholic violent ex-husband and was feeling pity for myself. Pity at how my marriage had turned out to be and pity that I was going to bring up Amanda, our daughter, alone as a single mother. And then a simple thought of wisdom entered my mind and I wrote it down in my journal and gave it the title, "Facing the winds of life." This is what I wrote.
Self-pity is intrinsically bad and life goes on while I am pitying myself. Meanwhile I can decide whether I will continue to feel sorry for myself or look around me to see where my life is heading with this self-pity. Sometimes the winds of life are cold and cruel and I have to dress for the windy weather. I have wrapped my face in a woolen scarf of feeling sorry for myself as I wait out the storm but it is important to know when to remove the scarf. If I wrap the scarf too tightly around my eyes, my ears and my heart I am most likely to miss the change of season. The winds of life can carry me through my life whether I want to go or not, I'll inevitably be blown through good times and bad times. As I am blown, I can curl up tight into a little ball of self-pity trying to protect myself from seeing, hearing and feeling what is going on around me, or I can face the wind, throwing my arms open to embrace the wind.
So it was with that simple thought that I decided to stop pitying myself and embrace my single life and the serenity and independence that came with it as well as embrace being a single mother and the responsibilities and unshared everyday shows of love from my daughter that came with it. Since that day I have never felt pity for myself for being a single mother, I accepted my situation and learnt to enjoy it. So my advice to you dear readers is not to waste life pitying yourself because as long as you pity yourself happiness will elude you. Just face the winds of life head on and deal with them accordingly.
2. Realising that the caterpillar has become a butterfly
It was in 1999, five years after I had separated from my ex-husband and I had built a cocoon around myself, to protect myself from being hurt by love again. Many a man tried to penetrate it and failed. At first I was so engrossed in bringing up my daughter and building a new comfortable life for the two of us such that I had no time to feel lonely but in 1999 I started to feel lonely. The new feelings of loneliness frightened me and I tried very hard to eliminate them by keeping myself busy with studying and work but every free moment I would get the loneliness would creep in. As I puzzled over where the feelings of loneliness were coming from a simple thought entered my mind and this is what I wrote in my journal.
It's easy enough for me to see how the caterpillar became the butterfly. I can look at the transition from the outside. The caterpillar on the other hand, is wrapped up in that cocoon and can't even look in the mirror to see if it looks as bad as it feels. One day it chafes and pushes to get out of the walls of its own making and finally wakes up to find it is a new creature. My transformation to a woman who feels lonely is equally mysterious and magical. First there is the surprised stage. Here I am my own old self, then one day my present life doesn't fit anymore. But I don't know how to make it fit, I struggle with my new feelings in my old self. Until one day I finally shed the cocoon. The feelings of hurt from my past marriage have disappeared,I am healed, which is why I now can feel lonely. It is a transformation based on accumulated changes. It's a process in which I have turned from being a caterpillar to being a butterfly.
With this simple thought I made the decision to start dating again. So my advice to you dear readers is for you to recognise the instance you turn from caterpillar to butterfly so that you can be all the butterfly you can be.
3. Letting go of winter so as to feel spring
Having made the decision to start dating again so as to kill the loneliness which I had started to feel, it wasn't easy to give up the single life I had become accustomed to and embrace the idea of constantly updating someone about my life. Was so used to being alone and doing my own things and having no one to answer to or consult, no one to feel left out and hurt if I make my own decisions without their knowledge. The thought of giving up my independent singleness made me hesitate to start dating although the feelings of loneliness where becoming like an intermittent pain in the neck. I was in a dilemna as to what to do, whether to say goodbye to the independence of a single life and kill loneliness or to continue with my independence and stay lonely. And then a simple thought entered my mind which I wrote in my journal. This is what I wrote.
The old die so that the new may be reborn. Plants, animals, people, all experience this rule of nature, dying and being reborn, either literally or figuratively. When we decide to make a conscious change, say to move to a new house, take a new job, begin a new life in a new country, get out of a bad relationship or begin a new love relationship, we decide to make that change because we expect a new "spring growth" to result from it. But for that spring growth to be a reality, there has got to be the death and destruction of the old like that experienced in winter when leaves die from cold, death and destruction of the status quo which had become the comfort zone. Losing the familiar is hard, no matter how pleasant the contemplated change may be. Sometimes it's enough to simply remind ourselves to persist, the change will be worth it. Sometimes we get stuck in "winter." We stay there, not being able to embrace the new and living. At these times, the best we can do is to let the uncomfortable dying process happen so that there is new "spring growth" in our lives.
With that simple thought I decided to let go off my single life and allowed one man to charm his way into my life. I let go the winter in my life so that I could begin to feel spring and that dear readers is my advice to you.
4. Making new footprints in pursuit of happiness.
Love relationships are complex and rarely do two lovers completely click in all aspects of life. There are bound to be some differences here and there and the extent of the differences will determine if the differences can be shrugged off or can not be tolerated. My first love relationship after my divorce was all roses at first but became thorny as years went by as he started to take me for granted. I was left with the dilemma as to whether to ditch him or to tolerate and continue with the relationship. If I ditch him what would the Zimbabwean cultural society think of me, they might think I am the one who has a problem of not tolerating men. But then if I don't ditch and stay unhappily in the relationship because of fearing what the society will think about me I will remain unhappy for the rest of my life. This dilemma was very difficult to solve, until one day when a thought entered my mind which I wrote in my journal. This is what I wrote.
The way to get beyond the footprints that I've made in this life is to make more footprints. If I have been plodding along in size eight hiking boots, I can't trip away en pointe in size five ballerina slippers, yet I don't have to keep marching along the same well-worn track. I can change shoes and walk in new directions. That's transformation, getting beyond the footprints of my girlhood, my married life, my divorce, my first love relationship after my divorce into a new life in which I am fully happy. As I become who I am in my new single life, I remember how I made the old footprints, I remember the running, hiking, jumping, twirling, plodding and the dancing that made the old footprints and can decide which of those I want to repeat. As I make new footprints that can make me happy I will remember the paths that served me well and avoid those that ended at a cliff and to hell with society and its judgement. Only God has the right to judge me.
With that simple thought I decided to end my first love relationship after my divorce and make new footprints leading a single and celibate life. Surprisingly enough I didn't feel lonely this time around. I had learnt that solitude is the antidote to loneliness and so would spent my alone moments in solitude indulging in my passion for writing. That is when I started blogging. If not blogging I would study or research, ponder and meditate about this and that or pray or play with my children. It was a very happy life I started leading even though I had no man to share my life with but that is not to say if the right man comes along asking for my hand in marriage I won't accept. It's just that I have stopped feeling so lonely that I start thinking that I definitely need a male companion. With or without a man in my life I can be just as happy and happiness is what we all seek for from life, or isn't it? So my advice to you dear readers is that your happiness is more important than what pleases the society and so you should always choose what makes you happy which might not necessarily be what makes the society happy. The other advice is that you should never depend on someone giving you happiness, your own happiness comes from within you and you are the only one who can dish that happiness to yourself, a man or someone can only add to the happiness that you already have within yourself.
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