Making Life Happen

This morning, a woman woke up next to a man, a stranger, they have been married for years and yet now she feels she does not know him another woke up next to a stranger, a man, she doesn’t know him, but that’s the only way she knows to take care of her children, that’s the only way she has grown to know. A man walked into the public toilets this morning, that’s his work place, that’s what he does, keeps them clean for you and me, a woman woke to go to the garden, the rains are coming, another read through her presentation, at exactly the same time, she is the board chairperson. A soldier stepped on the front line, in a foreign land, his country, his mission at heart.

We all wake each morning, wake to the tasks, the thoughts, the decisions and the moments that belong to us. They are what we have to work through to make life. Life as we know it, life as we want it or to that life. We are all making life happen each day. The policeman that arrests a speeding driver and the taxi driver rushing to his next stop are all making life happen.
The question many times is not what life we are making, but how we are making life happen. If we care to think about it, how we make life happen for us always affects the way others will make theirs happen and more critical still, it affects what life they are making happen. When we travel on those upcountry journeys where man and animal share space on the bus, when we are served a drink in stained cups, with soiled hands and a smile, we experience how work contributes to the making of life and we see people that are passionate about that which they are doing, people that have not taken all the care as we know it but as they know it. And their care affects us in some ways, ways that we may appreciate, or grow to appreciate later.

The point is we are interlocked individuals, all of us. The taxi driver and his assistant, the waitress and the chef, the teacher and the student, we are all constantly affecting each other’s lives. Some from so close while others from distances we cannot fathom. When we pay less attention to our lot, when we despise the lot of others, we are only dooming ourselves. The husband that thinks his decade long wife unfitting, the wife that grows cold and distant to the man that’s father to her children, all have to get to a point where they realize just how important the life they make for themselves is to as far as their grandchildren’s children.

Our lot in life may be small, it may be great, but it is always important. We are not to live without accounting. When we neglect the virtue of work and the virtues that should accompany that we should look at our government and the services that need our tax money to make us better as a people. When we start a culture that we know to be wrong, we can only wait till the repercussions come biting at us. That’s why when we choose to make life, it should be in complete regard of all of humanity, those we shall meet and know and those that we shall never meet and never think about.

The summary is that we are all important, important to each other, to our race and what we think, say and do, affects all and then affects us.