Sandile Memela says South Africa are, increasingly, unable to make time to nurture good relationships that feed the soul.
Pretoria - Sometimes one can feel like an atom – alone, isolated and abandoned.
You must have experienced those moments too when you feel that you have lost a whole nation of good friends, family, relatives and neighbours.
It is a development that is enough to drive one crazy because it is so foolish, you know.
What I am 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.
We cannot and do not reach out and touch to make another human being feel this is a better world.
For the last 20 years of freedom and democracy I have heard and learnt of friends, family and relatives who have died. They have just died, disappeared from the face of the Earth without having said “goodbye”. In fact, it is difficult to recollect the special moments that I last spent with them.
Oh, yes. Some of them are people that I would have reconnected with in the rush of a fleeting encounter at a mall where people are busy spending or chasing money.
Others are people that I would have waved at in traffic or shouted at to call their attention to the fact that I recognise and miss them.
But there are many others with whom we have exchanged cards and telephone 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 children playing in the sand or splashing in the pool. Of course, hopefully, we would not be preoccupied with careers or money or the size of a house or model of car one drives.
We would just hang and be the ordinary and simple folks that we are.
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.
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 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 material thing. So, 24 hours are just not enough.
It is not that I am beginning to give up on life or 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.
I now have a big problem with people who think they are important because of the position they hold, the car they drive, the size of their mansion, the label on their back or the type of bank account they hold. 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 should remind ourselves of the reason why we are on this Earth. 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.
Anyone who is willing to lose these precious people because they are busy making a living is just plain stupid and mad.
It is time that we make time for fellow human beings. They are the reason why we are here.
* Sandile Memela is a writer, journalist, polemicist and public servant in the Ministry of Arts and Culture.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Pretoria News