We are now half way through the walk.
Jane and I are to visit Zimbabwe in a couple of weeks. In many ways, it will be a sad occasion as we will be saying farewell to three loyal and dedicated servants of ZANE who are retiring after 20 years of service. We never reveal the names of our workers, but those leaving have enabled many thousands of the elderly to face retirement with sufficient food, money, medicines and love instead of penury and despair.
Many of those ZANE workers have been privileged to assist were WW2 veterans and their widows. In the main they have died – apart from widows. But many others have taken their place. Often their children have emigrated and their aged parents left behind were too proud to admit their savings had been destroyed by bouts of inflation and they were totally desperate. That’s where ZANE has a proud role and we couldn’t have achieved what we have done without our brave team.
So it will be a bitter/sweet occasion. But I am hope those who are retiring will never forget what they have achieved and the crucial role they have played in the lives of so many.
Running on Empty
Google tells me that around one in five young people in the UK are suffering from some form of mental health condition.
The reason for much of this seems obvious. It’s not that we’re hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power – these things generate almost as many problems as they solve. The core problem is the lack of meaning – the senselessness and emptiness of so many lives. It is the general neurosis of our time.
Our souls are hungry for meaning – for the sense that the world will be a little bit different for our having passed through it. If we feel we are merely existing rather than living, or that our leisure time has been drained away staring at a screen, then we might just as well never have been here.
The American Declaration of Independence offers everyone the right to pursue happiness. However, because it’s a political document rather than a religious one, it doesn’t warn of the frustrations involved in trying to exercise that right. You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness, but by living a life that means something. The happiest people I know are not the richest or the most famous. They are those who work at being kind, helpful and reliable – and happiness sneaks into their lives while they are busy doing those things.
Happiness is always a by-product, never a primary goal. It’s like a butterfly – the more you pursue it, the faster it flits out of sight. So, stop chasing and busy yourself with productive things – and happiness will sneak up and perch on your shoulder.
Like, whatever…
I am indebted to Miles Morland for introducing me to some really bad analogies written by American high school students:
- He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree
- She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
- The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
- She had a deep throaty laugh – like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
- John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
- Her vocabulary was as bad as like, whatever.
- The revelation that his marriage of years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock – like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.