Yes, we can make the time for our fellow human beings – and we must, writes Sandile Memela.
Sometimes one can feel like an atom – alone, isolated and abandoned. You must have experienced those moments, too, when you feel you have lost a whole nation of good friends, family, relatives, neighbours.
It is enough to drive one crazy because it is so foolish. What I am actually talking about here is how we are losing touch with not just our inner selves, but each other.
We are a nation-in-the-making, but it looks like human beings in South Africa are increasingly unable to make time to nurture good relationships that feed the soul.
Over the past 20 years of freedom and democracy I have heard and learnt of friends, family and relatives who have passed on.
Others I have seen only fleetingly. But there are many others with whom I have exchanged cards, telephone and cellular numbers with the hope that we will call each other to hook up and catch up.
Of course, it just did not happen.
I would have wanted to hang out with them, unhurried, spending a few hours where we just listen to the silence and watch little children playing in the sand or splashing in the pool.
It seems a simple life is one of the most complex and difficult things to achieve in the rat race. In fact, most people have no time to sit back, take off their shoes, walk barefoot, share a joke and a drink and laugh at our newfound stupidity as a nation.
To tell you the truth, it is stupid not to have time for people who matter most in your life. They are your family, friends, relatives, neighbours and, above all, colleagues. Without them you are nothing.
I think what is causing this stupidity – which results in a distance and coldness among us – is nothing else but selfishness, greed and competition.
I know so many of my friends, family, relatives, neighbours and colleagues who have no time because they are simply busy trying to work hard to get the next best material thing. It can be a fridge, a house, a car, a new expensive school for the children or any other material thing. So, 24 hours are just not enough.
It is not that I am suggesting giving up on dreams. But at every moment that I find, I tell those who care to listen that we are busy chasing the wind. This desire or ambition for position, status, money, career in the name of success and achievement is not what life or nation-building is about.
All these things, if you think about it, are what make it impossible for people to have ordinary and simple relationships with their fellow human beings. They complicate life because as soon as most people have them, they think they are “better”, whatever that means.
This is compounded by the fact that those who don’t have them also tend to think that those people are “better” and, suddenly, they cease to be the simple ordinary folks they are.
We are not in this world to spend our time chasing material wealth and riches that do not contribute in any way to the content of our character to be a winning nation.
You are not what you have because what you have has got nothing to do with who you are, as a person.
Instead, what is important is to reconnect with humanity and keep in touch with your friends, family, relatives, neighbours and colleagues.
It is time that we make time for fellow human beings. They are the reason why we are here.
*Memela is a writer, journalist, polemicist and civil servant in the Ministry of Arts and Culture.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media. Daily News