Love

There is an aliveness to the live-ness of a webinar. The clock counts down to the broadcast time and within an everlasting minute of sixty seconds, a few hundred participants enter the all revealing realm of a three millimeter lens on my laptop. The audio feed has been adjusted and the lighting in the home studio of the old dining room is now enhanced by a bed side lamp with a scoliotic posture. Tech checked. All manner of teenage home schooling, on line fortnite (sic) (really sick) tournaments, excitable Jack Russels, Netflix series and loud instructions from the Boss of the house to bath, or cut nails, or report with immediate effect for dinner have been threatened with a slow and painful death.

Outbursts are out.

The currency of pre-webinar success is silence. Even the doorbell is muted. Not that we are expecting anyone at 19h00 on a Winter’s week night during lockdown, but Hey, you never know.

Both my pupils lock on to the spy sized camera with the tiny green light. I am struck by the metaphor of what lies behind this minute lens. Everything I can’t see. It is an entire planet of possibility flanked by a strangely comforting bright green moon, and I try to imagine each person and the cyberplace they’ve flown in from as they visit without visas into the domain of my desktop.

Richards Bay arrives, and then Roodepoort. Boxburg, Brakpan and Benoni seem to arrive on masse – not too different from real life then. I am not sure if that is comforting or not. Welcome Windhoek. Greetings Gabarone. Cape Town and Kakamas arrive together – that wouldn’t happen in the old world. Kakamas would always arrive on time. The entire Eastern Seaboard of South Africa seems to show up – from St Lucia to Port St Johns – perhaps they think they are logging in to see the Sharks being crowned 2020’s Super Rugby champs. It might be the only time they have been top of this log for over four months. Umhlanga, Mpumalanga, Pretoria, Potch. Everywhere it appears from Aalwysfontein in the North, to Zwelitsha in the South.

It is all simultaneously nerve wracking and exhilarating. And over.

Well, almost over. The hour has raced past - I hope for the participants too, and there is time for some questions. All of them toe the line of the topic and stick to the structure of the script. Until of course, the last one.

“Steve, in all your travels, and in all the work you’ve done with Humanity, what is the single unifying characteristic which helps people get through tough times?”

I could feel all the pupils of the planet of possibility’s eyes burning through the lens on my laptop and I could have sworn the green light of its moon lost its orbit and faded for a moment. Would there be a profound answer? I was hoping there would be any answer. My own eyes came off the camera, they searched the cornices of the dining room as if by some strange chance there might be a post-it-note of profundity left by a previous painter. I repeated the question to buy some time. I acknowledged what a great question it was. Twice. And I stayed still for a seemingly endless silence to allow the frantic secretary in charge of filing in my left brain time to find the right answer amidst the clutter of my confusion.

He came up with nothing. Clearly, he had taken a tea break.

During this ostensibly infinite time, and half hoping the webinar would kick me out on the hour, my mind was racing through every page of my life long journals in search of some inspiration.

What is the single unifying characteristic which helps people get through tough times? A wonderful question indeed. I just wish I knew the answer. Perhaps one would appear in a bead of sweat which I was sure was about to slip off my nose and splash loudly onto my keyboard?

In just a few seconds, I visited hundreds of people from whom I have learned in informal settlements and who’ve taught me in townships. A brave young girl who survived a dog attack. Entrepreneurs who start with nothing. And who start again. In the travels of my mind, Mandela arrived, along with many other political prisoners. They have come through tough times. Friends who have mended their marriages and those who have lost a child. I reconnected with communities who have reconstructed their lives after devastating fires, and I bought another book from a twenty-two year old student from Zimbabwe who writes to put himself through University.

I played golf with Aaron the Caddie who has only two fingers out of the normal ten, yet he holds his high fives in his heart, and I bought a newspaper from Bongani whose service is his smile. I listened to choirs who sang from the depths of their souls, ate street food in Cuzco off a five meter spade and sat again with my wife as her Mom slipped silently away to another life.

I tracked with Master trackers, searching for a clue or an inkling or even the faintest sign in the substrate of my uncertainty as to what was that one thing. Where was that moment of magic in my memory? Then, like a desert flower reveals itself with a startling suddenness after the first rains, it was there.

Love.

That was it. That was the one thing.

People who have come through tough times have found someone or something to love.

My filing secretary must have thankfully just finished his tea break.

Each of the people who had been racing through my searching mind have at their heart, a story of love. They have loved their partners or their parents. They have loved their pastime, their product or their path in Life.

But perhaps the most powerful of these is a love of their purpose.

It is what makes ordinary people get up in the morning to do extraordinary things, and maybe especially during tough times. No one stands in the rain to sell newspapers with a smile on their face if they don’t have a love for the two boys they are educating. No one teaches chess to children in a tin shack if they don’t love the hope of a better future.

And no one spends twenty-seven years in incarceration if they don’t have a deep love for “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.” An ideal he loved so much that he would be prepared to die to see it happen.

Sometimes it takes a left field question to allow the golden moment to arrive unannounced and unscripted in the last few minutes of an hour-long webinar.

I couldn’t see the delegates but I knew they were still there, and as I clicked goodbye I had no confusion as to what would get me out of bed during these tough times to do it all again.

Love.

Steve