Butterflies!

I have always loved butterflies. They are such fascinating little creatures – beautiful, delicate, diverse. They are so free spirited, flitting about, dancing in the sunshine...

My romance with butterflies goes way back and runs very deep. As a matter of fact, there is a family joke about butterflies which my elder sister loves to recount. She tells of how I was always chasing after them, totally oblivious to the rest of the world. She once sent me to buy milk at a shop slightly over 10 minutes walk from home to and fro. After almost an hour I came with glowing eyes, excitedly describing the butterflies I had seen and how I had followed them through the grass patch on the way to the shops, but with no milk!

When I think about it now though, butterfly chasing is not always such a productive occupation. For one, they are so delicate, you never really want to actually catch them  because they will get destroyed in your hands – so for all your labour, you have nothing to show. Then again, butterflies never keep still. They are always on the move, flitting from one flower to the next and you never have an idea which the "next" will be, so you are on the move, not knowing where you are going!

Some details in life may be fascinating, but they could lead you off the path you got on when you begun your journey. I like what a friend of mine tells his team whenever they embark on a project – "No chasing butterflies" – and they all know what he means!

Less is more – In Favour of the Smaller Picture

Brian Munene, 13 years, is mentally handicapped and epileptic; the first born of two. His mother is single, unemployed and unable to cater for the needs of her children. His brother is blind.

Enough has been said about thinking big and aiming for great things, reaching for the sky, achieving great dreams. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture can be paralyzing!

I was recently asked to play a bigger role in the running and management of a home for children with mental and physical disabilities. While I know that the founding of this home is a very noble and caters for a very forgotten yet special group of abandoned children, I balked at the idea of being held accountable for making the "bigger picture" happen!

The home has 30 children living on rented premises and has no steady source of income. Being part of the team means that I accept the responsibility of seeing to it that these children have a roof over their heads, food to eat, someone to care for them and clothes to wear. It means that I have to see to it that they receive physiotherapy, get basic schooling, learn a skill (for those that are able to) and generally feel that they do belong to this society despite the fact that a number of them were abandoned and even left to die due to the extreme nature of their disabilities.

Yet, when I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a person who dedicated her entire life to making other people's lives count and who even after her death continues to inspire me, I do not see her "reaching for the sky" or "achieving great dreams". Rather, I see someone who was focused on doing whatever little she could using whatever little she had and as she did so, all her small acts of compassion formed the magnificent quilt of love, devotion and dedication that spans decades and encompasses continents!
Less is more! I am going to focus on my little piece of patchwork for the moment, and who knows what kind of a quilt I will make?!

As Marian Wright Edelman puts it:

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”

 

A Very Bra-zen Story

I got a very thought provoking email from a friend the other day.

It was a story of a man who went to buy a bra for his wife. When he got to the lingerie shop, the poor man was totally bowled over by the sheer variety – there were so many colours, sizes, shapes, styles and fabrics to choose from. (Coming to think of it, no wonder we girls spend 6 hours shopping for one pair of shoes which we eventually do not actually buy on that day, but return a week later, to repeat the process of choosing...and end up buying the first pair of shoes we looked at the last week! But then again, that is a story for another day.)

Anyway, back to my email. The shop attendant, seeing the man's utter dismay tells him not to worry because despite all the apparent variety, there are basically 3 types of bras – the Catholic type, the Salvation Army type and the Baptist type.

Unfortunately, this helpful advice got the man in a total spin, so, to put him out of his misery, the attendant explains it to him like this:

The Catholic type support the masses, the Salvation Army lift up the fallen, and the Baptist type make mountains out of molehills.

After falling off my seat and howling with laughter, I thought about it critically and came to the conclusion that none of those bras quite fit me, I neither have masses nor am I fallen and as for mountains, I have no desire for any such things. I need to find myself a bra!

I'm thinking perhaps the Quakers. They consider outward rites and symbols unnecessary (and even a hindrance) to spiritual experience and value simplicity.......

It's all about choices

©Copyright The Suyian Trust, Nairobi Kenya

As I struggled to choose what to wear to the office one morning, it suddenly struck me that life is all about making choices. My alarm clock had gone off at 5 o’clock and rather than get up immediately, I had chosen to spend a few more minutes in bed. As a result, I was behind schedule, running late for work and with hardly enough time to have my breakfast.

Life really is about making choices. We choose to hope or to despair; we choose to love or to hate; to fight back or surrender; to believe or doubt; to move forward or to hang back; to embrace or to push away; to give or to take; to receive or reject; to forgive or to hold grudges.

The ultimate choice we make in life however is the choice about the very life we live.

Each day we get to choose whether we will take in a new breath and believe that tomorrow will be brighter and filled with purpose or give up and accept that the obstacles and today’s losses are all that there is to it.

What is this thing called Love?

Some months ago, I got tired of watching the flurry of activity going on around me and having none of the action. Days had gone by without a single one of my "facebook friends" saying or doing anything in my corner so I figured out the best way to get everyone's attention would be to talk about something we all understand. I decided to start a conversation about LOVE.

After posing the question "what is this thing called love" I realised soon enough that nobody seemed to really have the foggiest idea how to define this so called "universal language". I got a few fumbling answers, some text book responses, but nothing satisfactory. Still, I was happy, at least someone was reading and posting something on my wall.

Next, to spice things up, I came up with a philosophical sounding conclusion saying something about love not being an emotion but a decision...really serious high sounding stuff, if I may say so myself. Now that really caught everyone's attention. All of a sudden, they "knew" what love was, or perhaps what it was not....and I got some colourful analogies of how unanticipated love is, most of which I dare not repeat here.

Finally, thoroughly fired up by the attention I was getting, I posted a very romantic quote and not unexpectedly, my "facebook wall" became a hive of activity....My mission was accomplished.

What was really funny about all this though, is that everyone assumed it was romantic love I was asking about. Nobody spoke of the different types of love that we have – a parental love perhaps, the type of love that believes in you even when to the rest of the world it is evident that you have clearly lost your way; or filial love – the kind that you have for your siblings because you know they are yours no matter what you do, and there is just no getting rid of them (love you sis!)....or the kind of love that makes a sister or a brother out of a friend (much like you, "L").

I pose the question again, "What is this thing called Love?"