Bags Please! We all have baggage but at some point you have to start unpacking. By Luyanda Sibisi

Bismillah this article was written by my friend and sister Luyanda Sibisi. She is a published Writer, Her article inspired me write the Bags article of my own. Whether it’s a new marriage, new career or being a new mom, baggage is the one bag you want to pack lightly on. I’ve always loved the song Bag Lady by Erykah Badu, I always thought I was the beat but the older I got the more I realized that there was more. ‘I guess nobody ever told you, all you must hold on to is you.’ This is my favourite part of the song. She reassures you that whichever situation you come out of all you need to have held onto is yourself. Your identity. Your faith. Your spirit. Baggage is when you take all the stuff from a bad experience usually the negative stuff and you carry it around with you. What is unclear to me is why we feel we need to own this stuff, make it our own. We expect our current situation and all those involved to understand that you’ve arrived with an excessive amount of luggage they whether or not they have space for it. We’ve all seen how kids love to show off their scars to their friends after a nasty fall. Once the scar has healed they still try to endlessly search for this scar almost to show off to their friends that they survived a dreadful fall in the park. We do exactly the same thing with our baggage, even though the contents of the bags are things we packed twenty years ago we insist on carrying it along with us to show people what we’ve been through and how far we’ve come. Why can’t we take our bags, acknowledge what we’ve been through but let them go when time says its ok to let go. There’s a prayer I love to read out whenever I feel my baggage overflowing it’s the well known serenity prayer; ‘Lord give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.’ There are scars in my bag I will always keep with me like scars from childbirth. The scars from the incision the doctor made bringing my child into the world are scars I wear with pride, I know that this is something I should carry and even look at as a beautiful reminder of that day. There are the scars I know I should not be packing in my bag, things that prevent me from building meaningful relationships with people and growing as a human being. So let’s take stock, start unpacking our bags and really look into the things we would much rather do without. Trust me you’ll feel so much lighter! “I guess nobody ever told you, all you must hold onto is you”

The games that people play Part 1 The Discreet Show-Offer

Bismillah
The more I interact with human beings is the more I think of my favourite IT lecturer Mr Joshua Phumlani Mkhize, Mr van Aardt please do not get offended. Other than being an absolute Programming Genius & lecturer, he was a Life Coach. Often when I was in high school I used to fantasise about being an adult. Why? Because these fantasies were mostly fuelled by my garbled insights of what adulthood really meant. Peer pressure, bullying, self-loathing, jealousy, arrogance and the rest, I thought were all illnesses that haunted the young and the restless aka teenagers. I thought that when we become adults we finally come to ourselves and become calm being whose spirits constantly float in a bubble of peace. I was aware that there were a few adults who suffered from these illnesses from time to time, but my mother chose not to expose me to such people; moreover she did not allow me much TV time, so I could not witness such behaviours in adults even on Soapies.
Mr Mkhize began by educating us about the “Discreet Show-Offer”. The Discreet Show-Offer begins by creating or sharing with fellow friends or other audience a crisis, such as crying profusely to catch the attention of friends or the audience, obviously the next would be to ask her “What is wrong?” try and catch it in the response if you can. Here goes… she responds “you know guys, I am so angry with my mother! She took my credit card and just used it everywhere as she wished; I just got my credit card, you know the bank doesn’t give a credit card to just anyone.” Did you catch it? The crisis was created to inform the audience about the credit card. Let’s take another incident and see if you will be able to identify the “Discreet Show-Offer” amongst your circle. “Guys I am not sure if you can help me, I need your advice. I borrowed a colleague my iPad for just a week that I was on leave as his laptop is gone for fixing; now he keeps on saying he is still busy with my iPad. I only borrowed him my iPad because he had an emergency” did you get it?
The discreet show offers will often have sickness such as gout so that you know they have plenty of money, respiratory problems because of the expensive perfume they wear, depression because of a colleague who can’t handle their intelligence, a rash because they are only supposed to wear pure cotton. The list is endless.
Now as an adult I have realised that these illnesses if not curbed at an earlier stage take another turn and become detrimental, not just to oneself but to the society as a whole. May the Almighty continue to bless Mr Mkhize for his Programming lectures and Life lessons and May the Almighty help us overcome these illnesses to that we can be better humans towards one another.