Author: Brand Smit

TUESDAY, 28 JUNE 2005

A phrase frequently heard around barbeque fires, on porches or balconies, next to a table in a restaurant or a counter in a bar or other places where middle class mid-twenties spend their time, is this: “I now know what is important in life. I know what I want out of life.”

I am in no position to question what is important to them or what they want from life. The temptation does however exist to ask them: What was your process? In what way did you go about working out what is important to you, or what you want? Did you lie awake nights contemplating the possibilities? Did you spend years weighing the possibilities and mulling it over? Did you spend months? Weeks, perhaps? Did it your hit you one morning on the way to work? Was it something someone said at a barbecue, or on TV or in a movie, or at the office, or on campus one day? Did you follow a thorough process of elimination where you considered a dozen, or at least half a dozen possibilities, with all the possible pluses of every possibility weighed against all the disadvantages and all the possible risks? Whose tracks did you consciously or unconsciously follow? Why those particular tracks? What needs do you hope to fulfil with your ultimate choice of what is important to you, a young adult? What goals will be fulfilled in the pursuit of what you want out of life? What is important to your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your cousins? Is there a correlation between what is important to you and what you want out of life and what they want and what is important to them? If you want to follow a different path, what are your reasons, your motivations? If you want to pursue a similar path, what do you think would be the reasons for that? And now that we are on this line of questioning, what was important to your parents, or your aunts and uncles? Did they pursue similar things to what you now want to pursue for the next forty or so years of your life? Is or were they happy with their choices? For what reasons would you think were they happy with their choices? Did they regret some things? What are these things? Are there dreams or ambitions that you have already written off as unrealistic and unrealisable? How much regret will you have in ten or twenty years about the things that you considered unattainable in your mid-twenties? What will compensate you for the dreams and ambitions that you would never pursue?

These are but a few questions for which you can pinch off an hour or so if you have the time – if you find yourself in a place where you know no one, where for the moment there will be no familiar voices to echo your own, or to talk you down, or to offer support.

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WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2005

Several thoughts are standing in line for a piece of paper […] I find myself developing a hang-up regarding credibility. I can lay hundreds of pages of text on the table, but … until now nothing has been published! […] Something must be done!

Paper is paper; ink is ink; and as I sit here in my grey shorts and grey T-shirt on the red chair at the desk in the kitchen with the blue fan making a noise and the rain dripping outside, feelings are feelings. And as it is, one is not always successful in your attempts to try and explain to your future self, on paper, in ink, exactly how you felt at that moment.

So what I feel is frustration … no, impatience, because I can see the finish line, or the destination about which I have prophesied for so long. I see it because it is close. The problem is that I don’t run straight at it. I shuffle at a half centimetre per hour, going from left to right and right to left, then I do a somersault, walk back to the beginning before I realise I have to turn around, then I trip over my trousers, shuffle forward at one centimetre per hour for two hours, fall asleep from boredom and lose my way again … and so I keep on going.

I need, for the sake of credibility, to produce, with official verification of success.

THURSDAY, 16 JUNE 2005

Rain – continuously for five days, endless laundry, dirty dishes, credibility as a writer and an entrepreneur, and a new question: Am I a little embarrassed about the effect that an intimate relationship has on me? It affects what I say and how I say it; that I am apologetic and what I am apologetic about; and it makes me appear to someone in a way I previously only appeared to myself – meaning financial status, my status as an unpublished writer, the fact that I work on many so-called money projects … that make no money at all.

Another question (an essential one): Do I feel as good about myself in an intimate relationship as I felt on my own?

As I was writing down the question, I realised it was loaded with misunderstanding and unspoken detail. Was I always happy on my own? Did I expect to be happy in a relationship at all times? The answer to both questions is no.

Here is my advice to myself: An intimate relationship is an environment where you are once again confronted with yourself – an environment which differs in crucial ways from the one in which you were on your own. It provides you with a new mirror in which you see yourself. It is an environment where conflict, both large and small, makes a regular appearance. A relationship is also a process in which you have to again define yourself – who you are, what you are, where your place in the world is, your ideal role, your relative value as a human being (and as a possible role player), your strengths and your weaknesses, what the future may hold for you, how much money you need to not only survive but to be who you want to be and do what you want to do.

Like the environment of the Desert (celibacy and loneliness), this environment and the accompanying process are also both constructive and destructive, both positive and negative; sometimes it leads to an awareness of happiness, sometimes to frustration; sometimes it leads to a decrease in positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, sometimes it confirms your existing positive self-image and confidence in your potential and abilities, and sometimes it is conducive to a strengthening of the latter.

An intimate relationship is a living environment where patience, love and mutual acceptance will lead to fulfilment of much more than just physical needs. In the ideal situation it will lead to a richer experience of being human. Of course, an intimate relationship can also lead to pain, disappointment and frustration. It is an environment where high value should be placed on honesty and sincerity. It is a process that must be cherished, even if you have to occasionally endure the less pleasant aspects that will be part of any situation where two people are in regular and intimate fellowship.

SUNDAY, 26 JUNE 2005

Says a Christian character in a movie to another character: “Jesus will save us.”

“I don’t believe that,” the other guy replies.

“Your beliefs have no bearing on the facts,” the Christian character responds.

MONDAY, 27 JUNE 2005

01:22

A random search through old boxes, old junk and scraps of paper that went AWOL years ago leads me to realise once more that I did not come into existence yesterday. I have come a long way.

17:58

How does one think? We speak in sounds and read visual representations of the sounds – but how do we think? What are the words in your head?

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THURSDAY, 9 JUNE 2005

13:43

People in a movie on TV are fleeing from a gigantic snake, and hide behind a wall.

Moral of the story? If you do not appear, your chances of survival are sometimes better.

16:25

Where am I? Where I have been for the past few years – on my way to the same destinations.

What do I think about? Same as before: Where do we come from? What are we? Is there anything we should do? If so, what?

FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2005

10:18

No longer my Place in the Sun, but my Piece of the Puzzle.

* * *

There are people who will look at a comprehensive account of how humans function – all the psychology, all the choices you have to make that amounts to you being you. They will look at it and say, “Fair enough. But please take the report back. I am a businessman (or a colonel in the army, or an English teacher) – that’s good enough for me. I don’t need to know or understand all that other clever stuff.” Or: “I understand how the brain works, how the psyche works, but I am 100% committed to my role, my position and my work. I don’t need any more than that.”

17:31

She is tense about going home. She is looking forward to seeing her family, but you know how it is with these things – she knows who she had been in her general behaviour, her attitude towards people and things, what she had been doing with her life, and where she was headed when she last appeared to her family. It is now a year later. She is still the same person … or is she? She has seen things, experienced things, entered into relationships with people whom her family has never met. She has done things that no one in her family has ever done, and in places where her family has never been. She has been confronted with issues, and with herself, in ways she had never before experienced. Do these things change the way she thinks about herself? Have these experiences changed her in ways that will make her not be the person who her family expects by default? Will she feel slightly uncomfortable among people she loves, people whom she has known all her life? Will she feel a little alienated from the environment where she will spend three weeks of her vacation?

These are questions that she may not consciously think about. Does she nevertheless feel the uncertainty? I believe she does.

SUNDAY, 12 JUNE 2005

I am in the living room watching Proof of Life. [N] is still sleeping. I have to hold myself back from bothering her – to talk to her, to start spending another day with her. Last night we told each other stories from our youth – first kisses, moving house, friends, my embarrassments in Stellenbosch [first few months when I “rented” a room from a family in their home but could not actually pay the rent, and so on]. Sometimes I have to remind myself (and I am reminded as I read through my notebooks) that there was a time in my life – as recently as a year ago, when I thought I was going to be on my own until I … was much older. Unless, so I had thought, a miracle happened.

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MONDAY, 6 JUNE 2005

18:57

Identity is expressed in the language, clothing and furniture of the time and environment in which we conduct our existence: my answer to the question “Is this who I am nowadays?” after feeling a little embarrassed in a Working House about the idea that certain decorative items will look good in my apartment.

[Makes one think again: Who would you be if you were born in, say, Moscow? Or, who would you be if you were born in Paris in 1871? Or, who would you be if you were born in 1771 as the eighth child of a poor peasant whose family is trying to eke out an existence on a piece of land on the outskirts of Bratislava?]

20:20

In the end 99.9% of the people on Earth comes and goes, and they either contribute in their own way to the maintenance and growth of civilisation, or they contribute to its destruction. Of only 0.01% of people and perhaps even less it will be said in hindsight that they were exceptional, superior to most of their peers, even that they were “destined” for important roles.

21:01

What she has been GIVEN manifests strength. What she has so far CHOSEN manifests character.

22:20

Everyone wants to know they are important. The idea that you are of no importance to anyone – neither man nor beast – is for most people too much to bear. How do people affirm their value? How do they make up for it when they become convinced that their value is insignificant?

WEDNESDAY, 8 JUNE 2005

Other people have their own stories, their own aches and pains, and have undergone other sufferings. They deem their own stories valuable and as valid parts of the Great Puzzle.

I also have my own stories, my own aches and insecurities, and I have faced my own challenges. Like other people’s stories, my own story is a valid and unique piece of the Puzzle.

Since everyone’s stories have validity and unique value for them, it is foolish to compare other people’s stories with your own and then to cast doubt on the value and validity of someone else’s stories.

Why do people have the desire to do so in any case? Is it because they are uncertain about the validity and the value of their own lives? Do they reckon that they will be more convinced of the importance, the validity, the value of their own lives if they question the validity and the value of other people’s lives? (And how often do I make myself guilty of this ridiculous behaviour?)

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WEDNESDAY, 1 JUNE 2005

15:41

The feudal order and the organised societies that followed the feudal order are good illustrations of how one is born with certain information – never anchored in concrete, but according to which people nevertheless live out their lives.

A similar situation exists today. Unless you are born with excellent – indeed, superior – pedigree and other information in terms of position, wealth and prescribed role and function – you fall in the group in which most people find themselves: where your position and your value for all practical purposes amount by default to next to nothing in the Greater View of Things, or Only of Value for Friends and Family.

What it comes down to is that by the time you are a functioning adult, you sort into one of three groups: a) next to nothing in the Greater View of Things, Only of Value for Friends and Family; b) role, function and value that extend beyond your Circle of Friends and Family; c) next to nothing in the Greater View of Things, and of No Value for Any Living Being. (Train arrives. The point: if it is not given, make it a reality.)

16:08

Statement: Some people’s lives only have value for friends and family, and by chance possibly for a few outside this circle. (Let us call it for the moment Type A.)

Statement: Some people’s lives have value for family and friends, and by their own will also for a few outside this circle. (Type B)

Statement: Some people’s lives have value for family and friends, and by their own will also for people they will never personally meet, in places that will never be visited by this person. Thus, his or her value exceeds the time and place where his or her existence takes place. (Type C)

Statement: Some people’s lives have value for family and friends, and by their own will for people they will never personally meet, in places they will never visit; these individuals’ names will be recorded in the official political history of a nation. (Type D)

Statement: Same as Type D, but to a significant extent because of given factors rather than own will, for example, the crown prince of the British royal family. (Type E)

Note: Some Types A accept their fairly limited value. Others murmur, but never actually do anything to change it (can therefore be called, respectively Type A and Type A2).

Statement: Some people’s lives have no value for friends and family (possibly because of the absence of the person in the lives of family and former friends, and/or the absence of friends and family in the person’s life), and also has no value for any human or animal. (Type A2)

FRIDAY, 3 JUNE 2005

01:45

I don’t write often enough that she is wonderful, that my life without her was dull, and that a life without her knowing that she exists is unthinkable. […] I hope indeed this is the end of a very long road, and the beginning of one that will prove to be much longer.

19:10

[…]

Still I wonder:

Should life be enjoyed,

or should life be utilised productively to achieve certain results,

or should life be applied to the realisation of a purpose that transcends given time and place?

Or all three, perhaps?

19:25

Young Taiwanese gang members are among the most conservative members of society. They obey their masters; they do what they’re told; they don’t question anything, and they obligingly wear the same uniforms every day.

[The above is my observation. I have never spent any time in a Taiwanese criminal organisation, so I wouldn’t know how many young members actually rebel against the old guard, how often orders are ignored, and how often plans are questioned. About the uniforms, I am pretty sure, though.]

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