My oldest son played his first cricket match on Wednesday. This was pretty marvellous to watch and made my ‘dad the taxi driver’ role, quite worthwhile. The competitive spirit of a bunch of six year olds waving the old willow around was a sight to behold! Cricket at this level is rather similar to Action Cricket. Each boy gets to bowl and face six balls. Losing your wicket when batting costs your team a couple of runs but you get to keep on batting. If you can picture a group of small short boys surrounding a pair of wickets throwing balls at each other, you almost have it. Where dropped catches, mis-fields and fresh air swooshes are the norm, catches, direct hits and cover drives are thoroughly enjoyed!

The cricket was a wonderful catalyst to some interesting discussions. The boys played against a team from a neighbouring community. In this community, one bedroom houses fight for space amongst garden shacks and blocks of flats. Each building had coughed up bright coloured clothing that clung to every available railing. Rubbish collected in corners and stuck to fences like new age climbing roses. This was not like home at all! There were no large manicured lawns with bright cheerful gardens. There were no maids to pester and nag and order about. There were no swimming pools or electronic toys or bicycles with streamers. It could be that the people who manicured those lawns and cleaned those pools and scrubbed those houses were too tired to do their own when they got back home here!

This was our boys first experience that all life is not as easy and simple and as wonderful as their sheltered ones had led them to believe. It was also something not easily assumed into the six year old lifestyle where life revolves around self at the exclusion of others. My child commented on the state of the fields and amount of litter, wondering why nobody had bothered to clean it all up. Another child commented on the unfairness of having to play against a team that did not even wear a uniform!

The simple fact was that this match was a meeting of two very different sets of children, one privileged and one underprivileged. The spirit of both teams was highly competitive, the handstands were awesome, the enthusiasm great and the result extremely tight. It brought home again the amazing leveller that is the sports field! What a wonderful place for these privileged boys to realise that people are people no matter how different they may look or seem. That every single one of us in unique and have wonderful things hidden within us that can be offered to the world. That with a little tolerance and understanding there is a world full of beautiful and moving experiences to be shared and enjoyed. That money is not the great measure of worth and that this yardstick is horribly flawed.

I too came to realise the great irony of my own life. My wife and I have gone to great lengths to send our son to this elite and brilliant school, where he can get a phenomenal education in how to succeed in this world of ours. This world which is so focussed on money and power and prestige. On the other hand this is the same capitalistic world that I have just left because of its self centred lack of values and single minded pursuit for material gain. It is the same world in which I am trying to encourage others to follow a different path, a path that looks to the common good. And so as my son rubs shoulders on a daily basis with children whose parents are mainly focussed on the material value in life, I am going to have to fight to counterbalance his life with my own alternative views. Hopefully, both of my sons will receive the skills to succeed in this world as well as a deep understanding of the real value of life. I hope that they will choose to use those skills to make a meaningful difference!

I had to laugh at a mother who was so flustered at being in this area that she was ready to leave for home as soon as she arrived. It would seem that old racist habits still surface in some with a terrible fear of the poor. I refrained from suggesting that she could alleviate a lot of fear in the future if she left her designer bag, sunglasses and shoes, the Range Rover and about a kilogram of real jewellery at home!

My life is pretty surreal at the moment. I feel like I am watching all of the participants of a whole host of plays. All of the actors seem to be wonderful people and all allow me to join them on stage and watch them as they perform. This is rather a mystical space as I have no right to be there and some of these plays are deeply personal and moving. There are some brilliant actors, and their performances are faultless and believable. Other actors are not so good and their true self lies close to the surface.

Some are busy with plays that I have previously had a role in myself. Those are the most interesting plays, not because I know the role or the outcome, as it changes all the time, but more because I have a new point of view. I am now an observer and not a participant and this makes all of the difference. All of a sudden I can see things that were previously hidden to me. Things like the stress that people experience on a daily basis. When you have none of your own, it is rather obvious in those around you. This is also the stress that I used to carry as an overwhelming burden that used to keep me bowed low to the ground. Perhaps that is why I could not notice the same thing in everyone around me, I was too busy just trying to keep my balance and see my way ahead.

The other key thing that I see these days are the interactions between people. We, people are a funny lot. There is so much information that passes between people all of the time. For myself, the observer in the play, there is so much I get to see that nobody even knows that they are sharing. What a privilege and a wonderful way to learn all about people. How they get on with each other, who is on top of things, who is valued and who not, and who is frustrated and annoyed and happy and wanting to leave. All of these things are there as clear as daylight imprinted onto every personal interaction and yet for most of us they are invisible. I have to say that I am having a fine time!

There are some new plays that are coming soon to my life. I am excited by the interesting possibilities that they offer but am also wary about losing my new found insight. I hope to find some way to anchor the role of impartial observer into these plays whilst finding a way to be a part of the play too.

In the play I wondered into yesterday, the actors were highly stressed and looking to get through the week as fast as possible. This play was all about a children’s party for the Top Billing magazine. My mentor’s role was to picture food and decor in a way that made it decadent and sumptuous. It was great to watch my mentor at work, keeping the client happy and taking pictures in far from brilliant conditions. There is so much for me to learn! I will be watching Peter later in the week in a show all about framing and I will walk away with my long unframed pictures framed by me. I will also watch him in action in the embroidery world, I am sure that this will be reminiscent of the Rocky Horror Picture Show!!!!

In my own play at home, there has been a wonderful reversal of roles. My wife caught a plane this morning on a business trip to Johannesburg. I still feel suspiciously happy that it is not me on the plane! For the first time, she is the one that gets to do the business and visit with friends and family while away. I am extremely happy for her as well as my good fortune to spend some quality time with my children! Ah yes, my super dad role!

I am off to play another role, that one where I pretend I am a taxi driver and shuttle my children all over the place. I know my wife is good at this one and I seem to remember my mom training hard too!!!

I spent the afternoon on Friday watching a championship gala at my son’s school. Kids gave it their all from six year olds to the grade sevens. It was interesting to watch the passion, the energy and the camaraderie. Other than that I was rather bored. What was more interesting was the parochial support provided by parents. Obviously parents shouted for their own children but they also shouted for other children that they knew. The parents got really excited and certainly seemed to share the frustrations and joys of their offspring. I was unsure who to shout for. Not knowing any of the children older than six, that left me in a bit of a quandary. What on earth do you use as your logic to decide which child will get your support over others? Or should I be supporting the underdogs? Big questions for a Friday!

One thing that struck home is that this is all very great preparation for the big world out there. There can be only one winner. Second may as well be last, etc. The world, starting in school, makes very definite distinctions as to who is better and who not. The distinctions are based on competitions that vary from swimming to spelling. In the big world these distinctions are most important as they define who will be successful and who not.

For the children that win, I suppose it is easy to see that we are teaching them all the benefits of competing. If you win, you get a trophy, you get wonderful recognition and you learn that this makes you feel very good about yourself. These are all wonderful attributes for cowing our children into the model that makes business work in society. In other words, they fit right in and are only too happy to be climbing the corporate ladder.

For the rest, I suppose that they know they have to work harder in order to be the best. They will need to refocus their efforts and try again. For most of them winning will still remain the primary objective. They too will fit into the corporate model beautifully, except they will know what it feels like to put in the work and be sidelined without any of the glory.

From a religious point of view, we know that in order to inherit the Kingdom of God, we need to be like children. In a book called Jesus Today, by Albert Nolan, it is stated that in order to be like a child, the qualities that we require are humility, childlike trust in God, a sense of wonder, playfulness and joy! That makes perfect sense to me and yet I wondered if I as a parent encourage these attributes or try to get my children to grow out of them.

Humility is a difficult character trait to teach, if not impossible. It is more a state of being when we know we don’t need to compete or compare ourselves to others as those comparisons are irrelevant. Yet the school and I encourage my children to win at every opportunity and to be the best (not necessarily their best). A childlike sense of trust in God is exceedingly difficult to encourage as it certainly seems like it does not have a place in the world today. Individualism is the way of the world, it is all about me and how great I am. Encouraging a sense of wonder, playfulness and joy is the easy part although this also takes some effort.

I suppose the bigger question is do we want our children to succeed in the world as we know it or do we want them to grow up with a deep love of God? The two don’t seem to be exactly in tune with each other....

On the other hand is it important for all of us to ‘grow up’ and compete in the world and later relearn the key qualities of a child in order to build and strengthen our relationship with God?

Is there a way that I can provide my children with both?

Today brought home the wonderful power of the mind, again! I think I am pretty dof in that I have to learn the same lessons again and again. I have ranted here in the past about the importance of goals that are realistic, achievable and yet a stretch. For the last ten years (or perhaps all of my life), I have wanted to run a sub 20 minute five kilometre run. The closest I have gotten is to just break 21 minutes.

Last week I was reading the Runner’s World Magazine and read with great interest about an Ethiopian, Haile Gebrselassie, who has become the first man to run a marathon in under two hours and five minutes twice. He recently smashed the world record and just missed out on breaking it again in his last race. Now the thing that really interested me is that in order to run that time he would have had to run for 42km at 2 minutes 57 seconds per kilometre. This means that he runs at faster than 20 kph. This man is a machine!!

Here I was thinking that a sub four minute five kilometre run was pretty good. Suddenly a bright light dawned in my skull and I realised that actually it is nowhere good enough. So mentally I shifted my goal posts. I thought that I must be able to run far faster than I am and so I set my new time to achieve as five kilometres in less than 19 minutes. A paltry 3 minutes 48 seconds a kilometre.

OK, so there are plenty of numbers in my writing so far but please stay with me. I have had a cold this last week and so have been really frustrated by my inability to get out onto the road with this new found goal and insight. By this morning, I was going to run, cold or not! Out I went and ran six kilometres at 4:00 per kilometre. This is something I have never been able to do and yet this morning with no training and a handy cold, I was able to run my best time in my life!!

The point about all of this running jargon and the nifty calculations is that we set our own limits. How sad and silly that we constrain ourselves when we could just push our barriers a little further away and then surpass what we thought was unachievable. My head is still spinning as the 4 minutes per kilometre thing was a utopian goal for me, one I did not really think I would ever achieve. Just realising that it was a pretty easy goal snapped something in my brain and allowed me to go out an achieve it. As I have blogged before – success in our endeavours comes mainly from our attitude! A lesson that I have re-learnt, again! I have my 19 minute goal in my sights and cannot wait to move those goal posts again!

So go and take one of your impossible goals, make it even tougher and then go out and surprise yourself!

Today was another of those frustrated stuck at the bottom of the wall days. So frustrated was I that I took it out on my lawn as I cut it down to size. One of the pieces of advice that I have received over the last couple of weeks was not to get uptight about things like my garden but rather to plough on through with what I am doing. Hmmm it was easy to agree to a couple of weeks ago. Not so easy to implement this morning. The grass certainly received my frustration with grace and had the decency to look pretty afterward!

I am not sure why I am uptight as I did manage to get through four typed pages but it was all hard work! I suppose that I am a bit of an idiot if I think that it will all be fun and easy! Then again there are so many tempting things to be busy with like stepping into my running shoes and taking them for a trot, or smashing some waves with my surfboard or even watching my son swim in a gala. There are plenty of more exciting things to be doing but at some stage I need to wake up and understand that this is a responsibility to myself that needs to be discharged. I will write and I will write well. Perhaps that will even be my new mantra as I meditate on my writing with my palms pressed together and a lopsided grin on my face as I sit in the lotus position!

I was going to include a couple of paragraphs of todays writing but perhaps in the morrow. For now know that even those out there whose lives seem to be filled with fun and freedom sometimes also struggle with getting down to work. So if you are huddled up close to your PC in your office, smile, take three deep breaths and have some fun with whatever you are doing!! I am certainly going to try!

Once again this morning has posed some creatively difficult challenges. I am learning how easy it is to get to the wall and how difficult it can be to push on through it. I have a far better understanding that I too am a brilliant procrastinator!! And yet I have no excuse, I have even had a morning surf. Speaking about my morning surf, I am trying a new technique – immersion, or at least this is what I am calling it. We sent my youngest son for swimming lessons in December for a solid two weeks. The difference in his confidence and abilities was remarkable. From a child that could not swim we suddenly had a child that could swim lengths unassisted at the age of three. My theory is if I could surf for two solid weeks, I too will have a step change in my abilities and confidence. I will keep you posted and you can count on my immersion being somewhat fun!

Another reason why the wall is so surprising is that we had a lovely weekend away. We went camping together with three other couples. Perhaps I am far too relaxed this morning and that I why I am unable to string any words together!

We camped at this beautiful little place outside of a town called Rawsonville. This is an area where the principle activity is the growing of grapes and pears. Imagine a countryside covered in vines. This is the time of year when the vines are dark green in colour and adorned with leaves. Our campsite was nestled in the mountains that crowd this part of the world. Access is by a picture skew dirt road that follows a lovely clear mountain stream up a ravine. We passed the wine farm and continued up into the mountains. At times the dirt road was only one lane wide with a steep fall off on the one side. I wondered who would need to give way if I encountered anyone else on the road, but did not get to find out. Further into the mountains, we discovered our campsite. It was rather not what we were expecting. To our pleasant surprise the camping area was covered in beautiful green grass. It had a little embankment which flattened out on the way to the river. The river was perfectly clear with a tinge of sepia. And it was all ours, not another camper in site.

With the gurgle of the stream and the shouts of playful children, I dozed off not once but twice! There is a certain peacefulness about camping. Time seems far more languid than normal and there seems to be so much more of it. I suppose it is because one is forced to rest, there is not much else to do. Much to my children’s chagrin, we departed on Sunday evening, certainly ready to return again!

Now with my procrastination at bay for the time being, I am about to charge back into my life!

Today my blog is very simple. I would like to say THANKS to all of those people out there who care!! There seem to be so few of them in the world that it is refreshing to find them. If you are one of them, please keep that attitude. If not, it is time to change.

A little caring goes a long way, especially in the workplace. And it need not be big things, just a pat on the back, a thanks, a how is your family, etc.

Caring often means that you need to go out of your way in order to help somebody else. And for your trouble, you often get nothing back. But that is exactly the joy of caring is that it is done not expecting any reward! I honestly believe that opportunties surround us in multitudes. Our problem is that we live our lives at top speed. It is only in slowing down that we see all of these opportunities that are often hidden by our haste.

To my photgraphic mentor - THANKS - your generosity and caring is much appreciated. To the rest of you, click onto this link to his site to see what he gets up to!

www.peterrimell.co.za

I found myself drawn to paper that I found published on the net. It is titled ‘Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul’ by Peter Saunders. Peter Saunders is the Social Research Director at The Centre for Independent Studies in Australia. He argues pretty emphatically that capitalism has been good for mankind and certainly far better than any other market organisational system. I take his point, I think we have seen the fall of just about every other system. Capitalism is certainly the one that has outlasted and outwitted. As far as Saunders is concerned capitalism allows us to construct happy and worthwhile lives for ourselves and this is all that we can reasonably expect of any society. He says that no socio economic system can guarantee a good life. He asserts that capitalism allows us to feed and shelter ourselves and provide for our basic needs as well as for technological growth.

I have to say that he makes wonderful and clear points about why capitalism has been good for us. I cannot argue with most of them at all. I would however say that the title of the article is a misnomer as it does not argue why capitalism is good for soul but rather for the satisfying of human need. Soul, it would seem does not come into the debate at all!

There is another chap in Australia called Dr. Clive Hamilton. Hamilton is an environmentalist and was also the Executive Director of The Australia Institute over the last 14 years. He has exactly the opposite viewpoint. To quote Saunders about Hamilton’s views:

'His message, aimed mainly at a disaffected intellectual middle class, is that we have become preoccupied with the pursuit of wealth and are increasingly unhappy and unfulfilled as a result of our materialistic lifestyles. Clive believes we have broken our ‘magical relationship with the natural environment,’ and that the pursuit of money is getting in the way of our ability to reconnect with our ‘true’ selves.'

Obviously I relate well to the views of Hamilton. I found an article written by him in 2004 for the Sydney Morning Herald;

‘But there is cause for hope. Not far beneath the surface most Australians have a gnawing doubt about the value of a money-driven life. A Newspoll survey also found that 83 per cent of Australians believe that our society is "too materialistic - that is too much emphasis on money and not enough on the things that really matter".

For they suspect that the money society is at the root of the decline in values - the disposable relationships, instant gratification, moral laxity, selfishness, corporate greed and the loss of civic culture.’

Thats pretty strong verbage! Hamilton also quotes a survey that was completed by the Australia Institute in 2002 that found that 23% of Australians between the ages of 30 and 60 have taken a cut in their income to get more control of their lives, spend more time with friends and family, or achieve greater personal fulfilment. He calls this group of people downshifters.

I was a little disturbed to see this fact. I mean, here I am only the second person that I know of in my last eleven years to make this change only to find out that 23% of the Australian population has already made this same change. More than that this group of people even have a name to describe them!

I think that it is utterly fantastic that there is such a growing consciousness of the fact that money cannot be everything in our life. I am concerned that in my country we still know almost nothing about it.