Of Death, Desperate Relatives, Disappointment and Destroyed memories

A family friend's Mom passed away a couple of weeks ago. A hardworking woman she was, who since her 30's (she died at 72 years), was winning accolades left, right and centre for her capabilities and competences in innovative farming methods from which she received above average yields. So you can imagine what she had accumulated by herself from her sweat over the years.

Together with her husband, they had succeeded in raising several children who went on to become very successful in their own right. They pampered her until one time she called a meeting and advised her children to 'stop sending gifts', because what she had was enough.

She had a city home and a rural home and it was at the rural home that she thrived in animal husbandry and cropping of all sorts. A few years ago she won the "Small Holder Farmer of the Year" award, over and above the other awards she had won over the years.

A few weeks ago, she asked her daughter for a piece of paper and pen as she wanted to write her will because it was her wish, in the event of her death, to have ALL her excess assets distributed to her grandchildren. The daughter refused because she thought it was a morbid idea (many black Africans are uncomfortable talking about death, particularly with their parents).

A few days later, she died of a massive heart attack.

In a nutshell, before her burial (in Zimbabwe they bury those who have passed on within 2 and usually not more than 4 days unless they are waiting for those travelling from overseas), her relatives which the children had never seen before in their lives had cleared everything from her clothes, matrimonial beds, curtains in both homes, televisions, pots, carpets, tractors, ploughs, in essence, all farming equipment. They wanted to remove the solar panels on the rural home but found the connections too complicated to tamper with.

Our friend is distraught. None of the children wanted their Mothers' assets because they have enough of their own. They just wanted most of the things to remain intact so that when they visit home, visit their Dad, the memories of their inspiring, hard working Mom would still be on exhibit. All those memories have now been destroyed. They feel violated, the memory of their Mom disrespected and are completely disappointed. 

Moral of this abridged story : write a will now :)

Steve Jobs Speech

The speech below is very illuminating folks.

Make time and read the speech below written and presented by the late Steve Jobs - co founder of Apple at the 2005 Commencement @ Stanford University.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, ‘Toy Story,’ and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.”

An escapade with Tsitsi Vera

Tsitsi Vera, seriously, how could you depart from us all, before Facebook. I have been thinking about you this last week and would have just gone into your inbox and told you how I feel right now.

I miss you. I miss the intelligence, laughter, noise, unconditional love, the tolerance, the naughtiness and the organizing streak.

Talking about organizing, when I was dating my husband many moons ago, we recognized that property prices were going up and needed to secure a property without delay as we had been on the market for 3 months with no joy. We were planning to marry but only after we had secured a home for ourselves in joint names.

We were young and uninformed although we thought we knew everything. We did not know that we were eligible to buy the house in our own different names. We then decided that getting married would fast track the process of us getting our first mortgage bond from CABS, a building society/home loan bank.

The following morning, we both dressed up and went to work. Whilst at work I called Tsitsi Vera and said, "Hama (Relative), I need to get married, now and privately. Are you able to swing a fast one?" She said, no problem, give me 30 minutes. In 12 minutes she had secured an appointment at the Magistrate Court. 

We needed a second witness so I called my young brother Mr S and swore him to silence after I had convinced him why he needed to be the second witness. 

We all rushed to Rotten Row Magistrate court and in front of us in her office was Edith Mushore, who with a twinkle in her eye was wondering why they were no cameras, flowers and why it seemed like a "quickie" wedding. We told her to just get on with it. She did the honors and we got our Las Vegas equivalent marriage certificate - quick and legitimate.

Thirteen months later we married in church and that marriage certificate was "blessed". 

Six months earlier, my Dad discovered that I was married privately without him receiving a cent for lobola. He then invited me for a drink after work at his offices on Jason Moyo Avenue opposite Meikles Hotel.

There were beers and wine. I asked him why we were having a party at his office and he said, to celebrate your marriage. I looked at him, grinned and mumbled something to the effect that it was necessary for us to conclude a property deal. He said, he knew but proceeded on to say that "I heard Tsitsi orchestrated everything?" I said yep. He said, this child of Abigail and Jerry is quite forward, but she loves you. I know she would never facilitate a union that would jeopardize you. But listen now my girl, you are grown up, or so you believe. When R is ready, he needs to come and pay lobola, but please advise him that there will be an added charge, a small fine for not inviting us also to the signing ceremony. The point is, your brother was there. He witnessed the union, even though it was under duress but he is equally your father (patriarchy talking), so if he sanctioned it, I have to sanction it as well. Good luck my child." That was the end of the story. We drank with my Dad and were merry.

Later on, we hooked up with Tsitsi and continued with the merriness. We were free. The secret was out and we had gotten away without any important family elder causing a brouhaha about it.

I miss that spontaneity and craziness that made you such a free spirit Tsitsi. I will always love you, my mothers' child, my cousin, my sister, my best girl at my wedding, and my confidante. There will never be another like you. I will love you always, till I also depart.

The fragility of trust

Trust is a very fragile virtue. Like milk, once it is split, it is difficult to gather. 

People need to determine what is informing their thinking before they embark on behavior that is perceived to be agonizing, cantankerous, suspicious, incoherent and untrustworthy by others. The truth of your untrustworthy actions always comes out and when it does, you must be willing to face whatever consequences that arise.

Trust takes years to build but just an instant to destroy. Being mindful of this, we must always remember that in all our daily interactions with other members of the human race, we are dealing with the intangibles like honesty, credibility, character, consistency, integrity  and sincerity. These intangibles are the unwritten rules of society that govern us. Often, when you do not play by these implied rules, word spreads around and you end up with a bad reputation.

Reputational risk is bad for your social and particularly business interactions and once your risk profile is ingrained in the hearts and minds of people, you would have lost your credibility.

People know when there is sincerity within another. It does not matter how much a person hugs and smiles at others, when there is no sincerity, people see it for what it is, a smokescreen and that the love the insincere is purporting to be giving out is not there to give in the first place.

There is really no point in exuding love through speech when immediately after your back is turned you do the opposite. Human beings are clever mammals. When their is no harmony between what is said and what is done, they always believe the behavior ; what is done. When you are consistently unreliable and not dependable, that is exactly who you are. That is where you live, in untrustworthy land. It is a choice you would have made.

May I please be allowed to repeat once more again ; trust is a very fragile virtue. When it is scattered, like broken china, it is virtually impossible to piece it back together. 

I rest my case.

Patriarchal manifestations

There are three calamities facing Zimbabwean sisters today : Patriarchy, patriarchal men and patriarchal women.

These three are a serious danger to sisters not only in Zimbabwe but around the world. Patriarchy and misogyny are so entrenched, self perpetuating, second nature to many and are being propagated and promoted unconsciously, in Zimbabwe, under the name of culture.

The hate for sisters has reached alarming proportions. The recent case of the death of a degreed sex specialist for a mere $600 which was not found on her anyway and the mother of three caught having an extra marital relationship after her husband invaded her privacy by reading her whatsapp messages unauthorized, are cases in point.

Patriarchal men and patriarchal women informed by patriarchy and misogyny were at the centre of hate speech in these two cases and as always in all the other cases involving human beings, who happen to be women, who have made a transgression or mistake.

May I remind everyone that all life, of the human race kind, was transported to earth via sisters' wombs and vaginas. If sisters were as hateful, scornful, judgmental, selfish and unkind as patriarchy and its agents, there would be no human race, finish and klaar! You are here because we chose that you live.

As a sister, a daughter, a mother and very much a member of the human race, I am feeling rage inside me, about the diminished status of women in Zimbabwe. There is definitely a correlation between the eroded economic status of many from amongst us and the general hatefulness being spewed at women everyday.

Patriarchy

A glimpse at the feminization and masculinization of poverty by patriarchy

When women are confined to the home performing only the necessary domestic duties of wife, child-bearer and nurturer and cook, a "feminine" stereotype is established and entrenched. When women either by choice or by force end up in domesticity, there are dire consequences for both women and men as follows: patriarchy is entrenched and there is an escalation of commitment on all fronts to attack those who dare defy this feminine stereotype. 

What is rarely discussed though is the pauperization of families by patriarchy. This is a new phenomena that has arisen as a result of failed or limping economies across the globe. By force and a false sense of honor, many men continue to be willingly ambushed by patriarchy, taking on the role of bread winner, when many no longer have the desire, inclination capability nor capacity to. 

No one person has got the monopoly on great ideas. 

Meanwhile, in domestic land, the women's intellectual capacity would have been eroded over many years of domesticity. The pressure for men to uphold patriarchy mounts and unable to cope, many opt for deviant behavior, such as child abuse, violence against women, drunkenness, extra marital relationships, suicide and so on. The once revered traditional family based on a shaky foundation of patriarchy falters and then falls and society is left with many unanswered questions. 

This scenario is being played out in Zimbabwe right now. Zimbabwe has became a nation where patriarchy is failing leading to both the feminization and masculinization of poverty. 

~ Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto ~

 

Worthy pursuits

Yesterday we were having one of many conversations with my family on ultimate freedom and its dimensions, the pitfalls of fanaticism, extremism in Christians and other faith based groupings, materialism and how it has altered the joy and happiness mankind was supposed to experience and so on.  One remarked at how the statement   "....those who are hopelessly enslaved are the ones who falsely believe are free", kind of summarises the discussion on freedom and that got me thinking again about what I have discussed in another forum here on FB.

Why do we need so much, when we already have enough and can still do with less? Why are we thumping our predisposed arthritic feet on a treadmill to nowhere. It was here before we came. It will still be here when we leave, this curse, fuelled by materialism called money!

There three important things worth pursuing:

1. A healthy lifestyle so that you do not need medical aid. The medical and pharmaceutical fraternities are bagging it, whilst we all toil to afford medical aid. It is not normal. It is called enslavement. It is public subjugation and we have signed on to it.    

You spend the rest of your life paying for medical aid and not using it and when you really need it, post 50 years, if you are blessed nowadays to live that long, your propensity to generate more income as it declines inhibits you from affording it. It is a glaring fraud of our times. Legalised fraud because all those premiums you paid will not be paid back to you. 

Even with medical aid, when your day comes, the best medical mortals will not be able to help you live longer!

2. Financial freedom does not necessarily mean having your loot stashed away in some offshore account for that rainy day or time when you are disabled by aged.

It means, knowing how little you need and require on a daily basis and fighting everyday to maintain a balance, an equilibrium that suppresses the advertising induced wants and focus on the needs. The need to spend time with loved ones, the need to stay connected with those that enrich your being, the need to do an act of kindness to strangers everyday, even if that act of kindness is just a smile, the need to read more and be wiser each day, the need to be more pragmatic, practical and prudent where life matters are concerned and so on and so forth.

3. Mental freedom is peace of mind. You certainly cannot have 3 without 1 and 2. Peace of mind is a preserve of the few. The lucky few. The courageous few. The fearless few. Those from amongst us with the boldness and relentlessness to challenge the status quo as it is defined to all of us by the power elite.

The enslavement that we find ourselves, in today's so called "civilised and modern" world, is systematic, public, legalised fraud meted on us with our consent under the illusion of freedom.

The tragedy of strength

Those who came before us, our grand mothers and grand fathers, our aunts and uncles, our communities etc, always taught us to be strong. Weakness was condemned and despised. And strong we became. 

Strength to overcome adversity is important, vital and a necessity particularly in Africa where as a woman you grow up being objectified all the time and given more or less the same status as children..."a bus travelling from X to Y carrying 80 people had an accident. 40 people died including 16 women and 12 children..." the story lines always remark.

But strength can be burdensome. Strength can be a heavy load to carry. Strength can be lonesome. Strength can be a liability because as you remain strong and grow stronger, you can unconsciously minimise those around you. People around you can become weak, not because they choose to, but because your strength overshadows without empowering them, it sidelines and is overarching without tooling them on how to be strong.

To be strong is to draw from a power located right at the core from inside you, the self. That process of drawing from within the depths of yourself is personal. The outcomes are overt but the process of delivering the outcomes is covert. You can only tell people to be strong but there is no manual on "how to". It is a personal journey influenced by those that were around you when you were growing up.

The tragedy with wielding too much strength is that should you ever stumble and become vulnerable and require particularly emotional support from those around you, the beneficiaries of your strength, if your strength disabled them over the years as you became the only reservoir from which strength could be drawn, there will either be resistance or failure to rise up to the challenge that is making you vulnerable. Vulnerability therefore becomes a luxury. 

That is why many strong African women I know just get on with it. There is no time to notice your vulnerability and seek that help one gets from air conditioned offices on the couch, where they recommend popping all sorts of small pills whose names are taboo to mention! 

That has been my very own personal experience. Nowadays, often, I wonder whether it was a wise thing to be strong. I wonder, I ponder, I experience self doubt, I question and even quietly weep, but I do not regret it because I was never taught weak. Strong is all I know. Strong has always been the Alpha and the Omega. I do not know how I could have been anything else but strong ~ Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto

And then...

After telling a waiter this morning that waiters are the ones that destroy people's businesses because of shoddy service, shortly thereafter, I ended up nicely tucking my tail in between my legs with humility. 

I had been dropped off at Sam Levy to do this, that and the other. As the driver was still far running errands, I decided to go to The Deli at Sam Levy. There were no free seats. I did not want to wait so I walked across to Millers Cafe by the front of Food Lovers' Market. It was almost empty with one or two people trickling in and out.

I settled in reluctantly and started replying emails. I was given the menu, decided on what I wanted and continued with my online activities. 

Forty minutes later, the driver called and told me he was going to be another thirty to forty minutes late. That is when I realised I had not been served. There was noise in the restaurant of staff chit chatting. I waved to one of the waiters and irritated, told him to go next door and see how the competition, The Deli was doing. I went on and on about how standards had gone down, how they were destroying the business at a time when many would-be patrons just cannot afford going out anymore. I was in my element and on and on I blurted out a whole lecture on customer service as if I was a stuck record.

Satisfied the message had been heard, some five minutes later, I ordered. The coffee arrived first in five minutes and the rest in fifteen minutes. By the time the main arrived, I was full from the coffee, so I nibbled on the ribs and asked the rest to be packed away for my dogs. I proceeded to ask for the bill.

Another twenty minutes later, the driver called to advise me that he was outside. I stood up, went to the front counter and quietly requested my bill, exercising restraint, with difficulty and literally biting my tongue so that I do not speak another word. The bill was presented. 

Then the frantic searching for my purse began. First I thought it was too dark in my big black bag so I put on my glasses. Then, everything in the bag came out, followed by shaking of the bag vigorously.

The purse was nowhere to be found. I called the helper at home who advised me that I had left it on my desk in the study where I was working before I left.

I asked the cashier how much? He advised $11. I told him to ask someone to follow me to the car where the driver saved the day. 

At the counter, I had wanted to say this last word, "Sorry, no tip, the service was shoddy." The missing purse, saved them from hearing that. How do you refuse to pay a tip of less than $2 when you are "claiming" that you have left the purse at home!!!

These are hard times, I could very well have been lying. Others do.

Moral of the story : Before giving unsolicited talks on customer service in a restaurant, please make sure your purse is in the bag :) :( :) :(