By the time I entered high school, my family had already moved 10 times and I had had enough. I walked into the public library the first summer of my new high school chapter and I went straight for the self-help section, yes I’ve been doing this for years. I don’t know what it was about the book but something about the picture and the title called my name.
*sings* Hello, is it me you’re looking for?
The book I am talking about is called ‘who moved my cheese’ written by Dr. Spencer Johnson, Google tells me it’s the same dude that wrote ‘The one minute manager’. The book is about change; to accept that change will happen, then to look for change, to manage change, adapt to it quickly, change and then enjoy the change.
I know right, what a mouthful! But it’s a great manual for change as it shows that change happens in stages. If we understand that change is as consistent as day and night which in itself is the change of day. Then we should understand that we need to look out for change because it’s going to happen. You don’t have to like change but denying that it will or is happening is self-inflicted suffering. The year is 2019 self-care and self-preservation is the name of the game.
Now let’s think of the many ways that you can manage change; give yourself time and space, stop pushing yourself. If it takes the trees a whole season to change then why won’t you be more patient with yourself? Whilst giving yourself this time and space, you are not twiddling your thumbs but you are looking at the new change patterns and how it works well with you or doesn’t. And as a result, moving up into your new level.
Change is always around the corner, on your doorstep, it always happens and your body is going to naturally respond to it with stress. The best way to go from stressed to ‘handle it with grace’ is to do the work and this is going to require for you to pace yourself, plan and execute according to your own resources and abilities. Acknowledge that change is going to happen, then accept it and honor yourself. If it takes you bit longer to do it, then so be it. If it means going at it alone then I guess you are the amazing race.
What works is doing the work and understanding your specific situation and if you don’t, observe yourself and record your data. Feels too technical? Good! You are your primary human experience and you really don’t know much about yourself except what you have experienced about yourself from past records. This means that what you know about yourself from past experiences may not work in new experiences and this may be the most daunting reality in our human experiences. However, we can keep track of our progress, triggers, and setbacks as we move along and through whatever change we are experiencing. And then do what with that data? Reflect! Reflect! Reflect!
Log, Track and Learn
Knock on the door and change is at your doorstep unannounced and is pulling the rug right under your feet. This is a whole new experience so you can’t even log your progress just yet but what you can do is to get to know this new change. Observe the change get to know its temperature, its mood swings, highs, and lows. Once you are better acquainted with your new change, get to know yourself in the new change. What is your temperature, mood swings, highs and lows in this your new change? Be detailed, be deliberate and most importantly be kind to yourself.
Once you have logged in your new changes, track your patterns; when are you on top of it, when are you under it, when do you feel weird and when do you feel wonderful? It’s not about being in control but rather about learning and experiencing yourself in the many human experiences that are to experience. And I can not stress it enough, be kind to yourself. You are allowed to be a beginner in everything and if you knew how to navigate it, you wouldn’t need to go through it in the first place. Life is fair, you experience exactly what you need, the class is in session don’t miss out on your best life.
So that they don’t wreck you! The best way to know whether you are on the right track is to make some time and look back. It’s hard to take inventory of everything in the present moment. But you can track your patterns, progress, and rooms for improvement after the fact and then plan better moving forward.
Ask yourself the following questions and find out if you are responding and reacting or maybe you struggle expressing yourself. Look at what emotions you lean on in which situations. Are you able to be happy in happy environments and what does your inner voice say during different situations?
What’s working with my emotions?
Which emotions are using you and are you able to transmute your emotions so that you work out in the end? Remember life will not stop happening which means that you need to happen just as much. Imagine you are inside a boxing ring, the whole purpose is to be in that ring and box away. Let’s say your boxing opponent is giving you all of the jabs, what are you going to do? Stop boxing? I don’t think so! Remember why you are here. You are here to live which means you better live and make the most of it.
How can I forgive more?
And why do you struggle with forgiveness and compassion? Are you holding on to the pain, an invoked memory, pride, ego maybe? Because it has already happened why are you still there meanwhile the situation has moved on and is hanging up new curtains already. I promise you with forgiveness and compassion you will hold on to the most precious thing you could ever hold on to and that’s you! Remember why you are here. You are here to be you.
How can I be more compassionate?
Remember when you didn’t know how to open or use a doorknob and all of the adults around you would express their irritation towards your lack of fine motor skills? That one question alone pretty much sums up my point, the adults were mad at you for not having fine motor skills and you really just didn’t know any better. So you continued to bang the door because you didn’t know how to turn the door knob. Now use that same analogy but this time you are the adult and instead of being mad take that same energy and bring plants back to life with it, as in love.
Hey! Hello! I just wanted to let you know that it’s still your life and you need to live it. Living your life isn’t always about going, going, gone. You also need to be vigilant and pause every now and then. When you stop you give yourself time to look, be observant and take account of all your blessings, your oopsies, and your next opportunities.
I know, I know easier said than done right? WRONG! It’s easy, peezy, lemon squeeze it. How else are you going to get that lemonade?
Journaling and meditating are great ways to stop and make time to process yourself. They allow you to release what no longer serves you and make space for more of you.
By documenting you give yourself evidence and data that you can do it. And then you can use that same data and evidence and learn from it at a later stage. Why at a later stage though? Because sometimes you have to live on before you can deal with yourself. So go ahead and start that blog, vlog, journal entry or even a social media post, 6 months from now you’ll be glad you did. Who knows you might even make money off of all of you, your good and your bad.
Now listen to what you were trying to say by going over your entries. This is a great way to also figure out your patterns and your life’s trends. And then honor yourself. You are here as you and nobody is going to do you better than you can. It is your obligation and duty to be you and honor yourself.
I feel what I feel and honor my humanness. I understand that we are all are at different stages of understanding and I exercise forgiveness and compassion. I release the ugliness and I embrace our collective beauty. I recieve love and so much more of my best life and so it is.
I haven’t always had what I have today or been fortunate to experience experiences that I would only see on TV or print media. So once I started to get my mind right, my heart receptive to more of my best life and my life making some kind of sense I wanted to give back or at the very least pay it backwards and forward. I was tingly, feel good kind of excited and I called the one person who would understand at the time this thought, my life partner. And she was in it, for it and about it. She recruited our gracious recipients, she contacted the schools and she spoke to the parents about our commitment. One thing led to another and before I knew it a decision turned commitment was now action and I was an active participant and so was my life partner.
The Journey
My annual homecoming voyage comes around and it’s show time. My life partner has arranged for me to meet the moms, organized an introductory meeting between the wonderful student recipients and I. All of these things I would rather not do and hadn’t really thought of. But being a celebrator of everything I suggest that seeing as it’s back to school why not start their school year with a back to school soiree. Again it’s still in idea phase and my life partner is a great big supporter of it too. So from ideation to commitment to action, the balloons, jumping castle, cakes, and gift bags are arranged and secured. My life partner still the number one supporter and confidant.
Then on the day of the back to school celebrations, my life partner starts to act funny. Funny like sour milk and not def jam or Trevor Noah comedy. She is no longer hospitable or serving our guests that she claimed she wanted to serve. I pick up on her vibrations and I decide I’m not going to add any more sabotage energy because clearly, she has got this one. Fine, sure, no problem the show must go on and it was a huge success. The moms were happy and the girl children, living and loving the celebrations.
Judy Garland remembering home. #khumbula’ekhaya
The afterparty
So after the fact I start to journal to see what worked, what didn’t and where we could grow. The answers were just pouring themselves into my journal as being; the initiative worked, execution energy from half of the executive didn’t and we could grow by having better intentions from the get go.
But I could feel it in my veins that my blood was boiling! My tingly sensation was now full on rage and I was angry at my life partner. Couldn’t she wait until the event was over to start feeling some type of way? How could she treat our guests like thieves? Especially when we invited them?!
What about Anger?
I started to read up on anger because I was trying to understand the situation better so that I could find a better way to deal with the anger I was feeling. A plethora of articles told me that I shouldn’t focus on a low vibrating emotion as it could take and keep me in a low vibration affair. I saw this as a fair perspective because I wasn’t trying to live in this feeling. But I also didn’t want to pretend like I wasn’t feeling this way, isn’t that how pent up anger happens? I’m living differently now and I’m no longer repeating past patterns that I can’t even profit from.
I read a little more and then I read a lot less and then I came across an article that let me know that my anger was ok, it was ok for me to be angry. I read that anger is a direct result of oppression and injustice experienced or boundaries crossed. And it’s that last one that tickled me, my life partner had crossed a boundary and it was the integrity boundary. She was saying one thing about our initiative and turned around and did something else.
Then it hit me again she was open to experiencing new and wanting to do good because we are all inherently good, so good appeals to good but her behavior pattern database had her acting a different way. Then it hit me again she wasn’t updating her behavior pattern files so she could only act from what was saved under ‘recently opened.’
If Arthur can be angry so can you.
Next up Forgiveness and Compassion
Then suddenly I went from angry all the way to ‘I understand and I’m willing to not hold on to the ugliness of this situation through exercising and working on my forgiveness and compassion muscles.’ So I crawled into the bed with her and I asked how she was feeling and I started to listen to her and hear where she was coming from.
It turns out she didn’t mean to sabotage the event. She genuinely wanted to pay her blessings forwards and backward but she allowed a scarcity mentality to interfere with her good intentions. Overall I’m blown away by our initiative and I’m excited for where it’s going to. I’m also glad I didn’t bottle up my feelings, I’m really glad that I felt the anger and the rage so I could move on and be soothed by forgiveness and compassion. It’s because of this work that my idea partner and I are 2 years into our initiative and we are doing great things together. This is only our beginning.
We are over 7.6 billion people on earth and yet we somehow always gravitate to the same five ways of doing things. From the way we dance to how we cook our food, there are generally five acceptable and acknowledged ways of doing things. When, where, how and why did we ever do that? And do these five acceptable ways of doing things even work for all 7.6 billion of us? Who does it serve when we conform to these five acceptable ways of doing things? Have we considered disrupting, diverting and or maybe just being difficult?
The big 5
I’m just going to leave those questions alone and hopefully, you’ll think about them and start to uncover your own truth because answering those questions for you is not in my ‘job description’. On a recent girls trip that I took with an old friend. We decided to experience a safari, explore the big five and live our best lives. Safari stays or trips in South Africa are unnecessarily expensive. South Africa prides itself in having the big 5, the lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant and the Cape buffalo.
The big five are such a national treasure that it’s on our printed money notes. They are considered the most dangerous and difficult animals in Africa to hunt on foot according to big game hunters a.k.a white men who like the idea of tracking down animals, shooting them and hanging them as trophies around their houses. They are also the most poached animals.
The big 5 really is more majestic than this Gif.
On our trip, we were constantly asked what we were doing at the lodge, whether or not we were maids and where our husbands were. When we answered that we were living our best lives, unmarried and what we actually did for a living we were met with strange looks. At first, we thought nothing of it until an elderly and yes white couple said and I quote “You are spoilt.” They said this as they pulled their faces in disgust as if we weren’t allowed to experience a safari or live our best lives.
What systems?
And then it dawned on me that us being on this safari trip, living and loving our best lives, spending our hard earned money and being two black women, unaccompanied by male companions was a disruption to the narrative that they had gotten so comfortable with, with regards to Black South Africans. You see what they know of people that fit our profile is not what we were doing. They are used to a system that says that when you are black, female, unaccompanied by male counterparts, are not a maid and are living and loving your best life that it has to be an accident and that clearly you are spoilt. By who, what and how is something I really did not care to ask or entertain.
So what are systems? It is a set of things that work together (not necessarily harmoniously) as part of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. Now why did I mention that things in a system do not have to work harmoniously together because the factors that maintain a system really don’t have to get along.
Take for example slavery. The slave masters didn’t get along with the slaves however through oppression and dehumanization the system thrived. Patriarchy, capitalism heterosexuality and how could I forget about religion. These are all systems that say if we do things a certain way then everything will work together. Except it doesn’t because it’s usually at the expense of someone else’s freedom to be and the exploration of their best life.
Shake, rattle and roll
By now we all should have seen that meme or post on the socials about not having a seat at the table and then there are other variations that promote building your own table and that’s all good and well except that also doesn’t work because the only understanding of systems are oppressive, toxic and most of all exclusive and not inclusive. Think about that the next time you are in the VIP area, at an invite-only affair or apart of a clique and realize that you are apart of the problem. Perpetuating the very toxic systematic tendencies that oppress you is not liberation it is just recycling demons. And how’s that hell working for you?
So what am I suggesting? Break the table, fuck shit up, disrupt, divert over and over again and most of all be difficult. When they tell you that there’s no room for that idea go ahead and do it anyway without the secret society attached. Allow your idea to breathe so that it can recreate and if you have to be systematic think Mother Nature, hello ecosystem. The giving and most sustainable system we have come know.
Considering that a tree and a flower may look similar in their respective budding stages when a flower chooses to flower, bloom and blossom it is disrupting the almost happened redundancy of looking like and maybe being a tree. Disrupting, diverting and or being difficult does not mean that you have to be rude or violent about it. Disrupting, diverting and being difficult could be as simple as choosing your best life, living and loving it confidently. There really is something about that that pisses people off. Go out there and be your best unruly self as you live and love your best life.
The movement, a changed mind and direction work. As daunting as it can be don’t settle on safe. Safe spaces are there to help you build and renew yourself. Safe spaces are there to get you out of harm’s way. Thereafter you get to build yourself up and move on and up into your next level.
What’s not working?
Standing still. Are you a pole? Why are you going down the same road be it physical, mentally or spiritually? Are you retracing your steps in your patterns to maybe see what you can work and where you should move on? Won’t you try something different today?
Where can I grow?
In movement. Have you ever sat in the same position for a minute too long? What happened? Maybe stiffness, pins, and needles anyone? Staying in the same position will keep you in the same position and that has worse consequences than disrupting, diverting and or being difficult ever will.
It’s not every day that you get a call to disrupt, divert or be difficult but I urge you to pick up the phone and have the conversation. When seeds first shoot and roots come out of a seed they come out as a result of disrupting, diverting and being difficult. How are roots and a shoot being difficult? Well with each growth step they are choosing to go beyond the seed level.
When Honorable Judge Judy says work, WORK dear!
Affirm, declare and ask all of the questions as you disrupt, divert and are being difficult.
Affirmation I am difficult in the face of my oppression. My life is too precious to be stagnant. In the face of redundancy and conformity, I disrupt. Because I understand that what I release multiplies and comes back to look for me in abundance. I receive growth
Declaration I declare that I am difficult at the face of my own oppression. I decree that I will not be an accomplice to my own oppression. Please miss me with EVERYTHING that does not, could not and will not serve me. Please and Thank you.
Questions
What am I afraid of?
Who and what am I trying to please by going with the flow?
How can I honor my journey?
Sure fine you could keep eating the same meal for the rest of your life. Or putting in little to no effort and expecting miracles in return. It’s your life do what you have to do, what you want to do and what you need to do. Just don’t be surprised by the kind of results that you get from whatever you choose. But if you are wanting a different you, you are going to have to do differently. So please put a 1 and a 2 to it and divert,
Different ways to say No
Why no? Because we say yes a lot in our comfort zones and don’t really think it through.
I can’t I won’t I don’t feel like it Not today
Ways to move and divert
Besides jumping jacks and burpees you can try out a new restaurant; try a new route for either jogging, way to work; order something different on the menu and or try a new brand or debrand all together.
Research 5 different perspectives that you know nothing about. (weekly) Talk and listen to a friend, family or loved one. (daily) try 5 things that you have not tried before. (once a month)
Sheneneh will not save you from the work that you have to do.
