Author: Brand Smit

MONDAY, 4 APRIL 2016

By the time you’re a young adult, eighteen to early twenties, the people who will become the next generation of young adults are seven to twelve years behind you – at that time children, or at most teenagers to whom you pay little attention.

By the time you are thirty, that next group of birthlings are ready to take over the spots you and your age group had recently vacated as “young adults”.

By the time you are 35, that group of people are themselves between 23 and 28, which means it’s not uncommon for you to warm your hands at the same barbeque fire as at least the older members of the next generation. Friendships might be forged, and you may even get romantically involved with someone from this generation.

Time goes on. You hit forty. If you haven’t worked it out or noticed it yet, it will hit you soon enough: Yet another generation has made their appearance; people who are between seven and twelve years younger than the generation that had followed on your peer group. These new members of adulthood are at this stage ranging from high school age to mid-twenties.

And you know: If the world belongs to people with the most energy and vitality and ambition and even naïve idealism, the world now belongs to this group of young adults.

You reach the ripe age of 45, and the oldest members of that whole second generation who had reached maturity after you are now 30 years old. Some of them are married. Some have children. Chances are that they work for you, but it is also possible that you work for one of them, that a member of this generation is giving you instructions on what to do and what not to do.

You are mostly a stranger to this “second” group of new adults, but you have a reasonable idea of what’s important to them. References to their tastes and preferences are commonplace on TV and in everyday conversations, and it is their musings and ramblings that are pushed to the top of literary websites.

Chances are slim that your social circles will ever overlap. You shuffle past each other in crowded pubs. If you find yourself in a situation where silence would be awkward, they might be reluctant to say too much because they might expect that you’ll be as critical as their parents about their appearance and the choices they make. You may also not be too talkative because you wouldn’t want to sound old, and heaven forbid you create the impression you’re trying to be cool.

And so time marches on. The forties, remarked someone who had gone through the strange process years ago, mark the old age of your youth – your fifties being the youth of old age.

One thing about this fifth decade of your earthly existence is nothing new: If you’re lucky enough to slow down every now and then in the rush to stay alive, you might just find yourself once again trying to sort out who and what you are and who you want to be, more or less based on who you were ten and twenty years ago, and considering who and what you hope to be in the future – provided you’re still to be found in the land of the living in another two or three decades’ time.

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MONDAY, 28 MARCH 2016

The Byzantine Empire is a good metaphor for human life: power in youth, vanity because of it, decline as time passes, betrayal by people you trusted, last desperate attempts to save your legacy and do something worth remembering, and then, the inevitable end.

Read more about the Byzantine Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

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SATURDAY, 26 MARCH 2016

I am still hard at work editing and translating material that I wrote years ago – in some cases as much as twenty years ago. Some of the material has never seen the outside of a notebook; in other cases the text has already been published in Afrikaans, but as part of the translation process I can’t help revising it, again, for the umpteenth time.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when I read this afternoon about the American poet Walt Whitman. The first edition of his collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1855, but over the following decades he continued reviewing the material and rewriting parts of it.

Then, in January 1892, two months before his death, he put a notice in the New York Herald: “Walt Whitman wishes respectfully to notify the public that the book Leaves of Grass, which he has been working on at great intervals and partially issued for the past thirty-five or forty years, is now completed, so to call it, and he would like this new 1892 edition to absolutely supersede all previous ones. Faulty as it is, he decides it as by far his special and entire self-chosen poetic utterance.”

Follow these links for more on Walt Whitman and his poetry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass

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FRIDAY, 18 MARCH 2016

Think of a specific problem, and specific resources at your disposal. For example, say you lock yourself out of your house. You look around and all you see is a piece of wire, a broom, a rusty screwdriver and a brick. What you really need is your key, but you don’t have your key. What do you do? You take that piece of wire, the broom, the screwdriver and the brick, and you do your best.

It is the same with making money.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet era is that there are so many methods with which you can generate an income. And therein also lies the problem. It is the easiest thing in the world to fill your bag to such a degree with things you want to do that you can hardly fit it through the train window to embark on your journey to Financial Wellness. As the minutes tick by before the train departs, you know you’d have to unpack some of the items and leave it on the platform. But as hard as you try you cannot get yourself to do it. And so, finally, the train departs without you.

I’m wondering, for instance, what I would do if I only had my English classes, my writing and two other commercial book projects to achieve at least my financial goals for this year. I can’t say for sure if I will accomplish these goals, but one thing is certain: I will do more, and try harder to make money with my writing and the other book projects than is currently the case (yes, even with my writing).

Why do I not do that, seeing that I have just declared what I will do? Because there is always a light that flickers on and off – over there, on that side. “Oh,” I’ll say, “it’s [any of several things I can also do to make more money]. Let me just quickly see what’s going on.”

TUESDAY, 5 APRIL 2016

Tail end of a thought stream: I believe the guy with a grove full of orange trees and nothing else would eventually work out a way to make money with those oranges – fresh orange juice, frozen orange juice, orange peels, bags full of oranges, dried oranges, orange pound cakes …

Would he do better than the guy who also started with a dozen orange trees in his back yard, who reckons it is a waste of time, then buys a few dozen pairs of shoes to sell door to door, and after a month stuffs the unsold shoes in the attic, then does a crash course in gardening and buys himself a set of tools to start a gardening business, knowing that there are other people in the neighbourhood who also offer gardening services and who are better at marketing than he is?

I think the likelihood is greater that the guy who stayed with the oranges would eventually figure out a way to build a steady income.

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FRIDAY, 18 MARCH 2016

Between 2006 and quite recently I laboured under the false impression that you can do anything if you just know how. You can set up a website – if you just know how. You can write a novel – if you know how. You can make money in any of a dozen ways – if you can just lay your hands on the right PDF that will explain everything to you in seventeen easy steps. You can create your own business you can manage from home – if you just had the right set of DVDs that will explain the process to you. And so I can go on.

Needless to say, I started gathering with characteristic passion information in various forms and from any self-proclaimed tutor who promised hand on chest to reveal all the secrets known only to the inner circle.

Ten years later, I know more than ever. These days I know not only about the European explorations of the fifteenth century or the Byzantine Empire or the First or Second World War, I also know how to make a website in less than thirty minutes, from idea to someone in Paraguay or Zimbabwe can access it and read what I have published (if I can write something that quickly). I know how to make money by doing stuff for other people. I know how to make money by buying and selling the probability that a particular horse will win a particular race before the race has even started. And, frankly speaking, a lot of other things.

But – I have also learned, to my great consternation, that simply knowing how to do something is not enough.

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