Tim Conibear: Hopes and dreams
A look at the notion of self-pity and how chance encounters can put your life into perspective.
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"We are born with a chance,
And I am going to have my chance."
Henry Rollins of Black Flag taken from the track, Rise Above.
We love to complain. Myself included. We’re never quite happy with where we find ourselves. In our home lives, in our professional lives, in our friendships and our relationships, we never seem quite satisfied. And there comes a point where we seem to give in, accept our lot and that the hopes and dreams of our youth may never be realised in full, to remain only at touching distance, so tantalisingly close until, eventually, they fade away.
Nothing’s ever quite perfect, the way we want it to be, or maybe the way we expect it to be. As to what and why exactly we have such expectations is for another day, this little blog serves only to say that we don’t realise just how good we really have it.
Sometimes all it takes to realise this is the timely intervention of a stranger or in this case, two.
The first I met on the beach. Lying in the afternoon heat, leg in a brace bemoaning my lack of fortune and that I couldn’t go surf. Lying with the rest, beached on the sand in a pool of sweat and sunscreen thoroughly miserable like a spoilt child. I forget his name but he was from Zimbabwe and I watched him skip and step between the islands of burned and burning bodies, greeting each one with good grace irrespective of the reception they gave him. For the most part, he was shrugged off and dismissed with little more than a cursory flail of a heat-wilted arm. In the heat and my frustration, my initial intention was to be no different. But he smiled at me, so I smiled back.
He was selling pastel drawings of Table Mountain like every other hawker, desperate to make a sale so he could leave the heat and find some shade. I had no money and patted my empty pockets. It was a shame as he’d improvised a few township shacks with cut up old Coke cans he’d found on the beach and I’d liked to have purchased one. I told him as much and with that we had a quick conversation. He picked my accent and asked where I was from, I told him the UK. I returned the question, he said Zimbabwe.
I had come over on a business visa. He had fled over the border from a tyrannical regime; no papers, no passport. I would go home for Christmas to my family. He was unsure when he’d next see the family he’d left behind. That evening, I would go home. That evening as we left the beach, I saw him retuning to a cardboard shelter tucked in behind the large stone staircase that wound down between the multi-million rand houses. His English was good and he was obviously educated but he was a refugee - legal or illegal, I have no idea. He had nowhere to go, no way of finding work and little hope of finding a permanent shelter in the immediate future.
The second man I met was a friend of a friend from the township in which I work. He had approached me and asked for work but I was unable to offer him any. He was a single man in his mid-thirties and was desperate to earn some money so he could approach a girl to get married. Chatting to the friend who had referred him to me, we discussed his situation and the circumstances he found himself in. As a single man not much older than myself, he would have completed the majority of his education during the 1980’s and early 1990’s - a time when the school curriculum was controlled by the Nationalist government who where responsible for the implementation of apartheid. Due to his skin colour he, in the opinion of the government, was never destined for anything greater than manual labour and his education, as with the education of all non-whites at the time, was tailored accordingly. This man was left with no qualifications, was only partially literate and was asking me, several years his junior, for work of any kind. It was uncomfortable.
So I love to complain. And I love to whinge and moan and all to often these grievances find their way into these pages. But the frustration is borne of the fact that we take so much for granted. We were fortunate to be born into a world where we can say and do what we please without fear of retribution. We can move freely through the world on our passports and, when necessary, we apply for visas and not asylum. We posses an education that will stand us in stead wherever we go and qualifications that will enable us to find gainful employment if we look hard enough.
We don’t just have it good; we have it great. We are free, answerable only to ourselves and, with a little self-confidence and self-belief, are able to do what we please. We live in a society relatively free from corruption with governments that will offer us support if we decide to pursue our own goals with passion and drive. The sacrifices we make and that cause us to second-guess are, for the most part, material and once made, rarely considered again. True, it’s not always that simple. Jacking it all in and taking off on a limb is intimidating. But intimidating only as we leave behind what we’ve become all too comfortable with, those little things we’ve come to expect.
“You only live once” I heard a man say the other night in a city bar shortly before he skulled another tequila and his bloated face flushed red. It maybe the worst cliché of them all but there is never one more relevant today.
More and more people have more and more time on their hands, whether this is a cause for misery or celebration, we will only find out in time. But time can be a blessing and we enter the wider world armed with all the tools to make the days we have as interesting and fulfilling as we choose.
It’s good to be reminded that we are indeed lucky for all we’ve been given. For us, the world is less scary than most.
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Hopes and dreams (text) by Tim Conibear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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