Balance & Stability

Two words that can be used to describe pretty much nothing at the moment if you were to scan the news headlines.

Rather don’t. I did which I swore I would not do, and now I’m suffering the consequences.

Prime Ministers fleeing countries, pushed out of office, Billionaires buggering around with buyouts and bots, Dystopian rulings, actual wars with bombs, and let’s not forget a disease really called Monkeypox which I had a typical Mom-style rant at my son about as I thought it was a fake story he picked up on TikTok. I wasted a really good soliloquy on the merits of factual sources, not believing everything you see on social media, and approaching weird diseases with random photos with caution. In my defence come on… Monkeypox?

Closer to home in South Africa and more specifically my hometown Durban, tomorrow marks one year since the province came under a very orchestrated attack on transport, food, medicine, fuel and rioting that brought us to our knees. (Read Beautiful, Broken but not beaten) Some of us were only just beginning to find our footing when April’s catastrophic floods decimated large areas of our province, ripping apart land, roads, houses, and – heartbreakingly – families who lost loved ones.

Water shortages, gas shortages, fuel shortages and no electricity followed shortly.

You have to dig deep to carry on whilst dealing with loss, and trying to get by without basic amentities. Something a large part of our population has to content with daily – floods and rioting aside.

We need an app that combines the weather, traffic, potholes location, loadshedding schedules, water restrictions, telkom outages, covid levels if that is still applicable, and the current daily fuel and bread price.
We need to know all this before we have the first sip of our Ricoffy because well Nescafé is a distant memory. We could also add in the spin-the-wheel exchange rate game, which airline is still flying, and which country has abruptly changed their visa requirements for us Saffers.

Right now nothing feels in balance.
Right now nothing feels stable.

… when I look outward.

And I’m desperate to feel balance and stability in the world again.

So I have to look inward.

I have no control over my external environment.
I don’t have the answers.
I have learnt loads of tools to help me through the down days but sometimes I need more.
I am grateful. Everyday. For all the beauty and joy in my life.
Tonight however, I just needed to write and release.
I don’t have a neat ending paragraph to sum things up and make it all better.
I think I just need to find my own way to create balance and stability with where I am and what I have.