Letting go yesterday and living today

Yesterday and the day before yesterday are not like today. (Swahili)

Dear Zayda,

Each new day is unlike any that has gone before.

This first year of your life is special for your mom and dad, because your daily changes remind that that nothing remains the same from one day to the next. Those close enough to you to see you grow can know that what is true about you, is true about us all. No day that is past can be anything like the day we have now.

Yet many of us feel weighed down by our yesterdays as we get older. We may see ourselves as stuck in old thoughts and old habits. We allow our yesterdays to dictate what our today will be like. We allow the past to decide the future.

But we can always take charge of today.

Uncle Mass (my mother's brother whose real name is Colin) has been a farmer all his life. Being with living things is a way to remind us that each day is different. Plants grow and change through different seasons. Our plants in Jamaica do not have a long winter sleep as yours do in Canada, but we have seasons just the same. So Uncle Mass has his time to plant seeds, to nourish his plants, and to harvest the fruit. He keeps cows and goats as well, and each day for his animals is also different from the days that went before.

Uncle Mass is now 93 years old. He continues to let go of the yesterdays and treat each new day like a gift. By eight o’clock each morning. Uncle Mass has completed about half-day’s work on his farm. He will take a break in the middle of the day when the sun hot, and then he is back doing his chores in the cool of the afternoon. He remains as slim and healthy as men young enough to be his grandsons. Recently, he was on his roof directing repairs. When I visit him, we discuss local and global politics, and he has opinions on all the events going on around him. He and his brother Bob are neighbours, but Uncle Mass is as independent as he was when I was a child.

Aunt Ettie (my father’s sister)is a special example to me of focusing on what we can do in the present rather than living in regrets about yesterday. On one of her trips to England, someone stole all her money at the start of her holiday. I am sure she was sad for a moment, but she did not spend her “today” feeling sorry about what “yesterday” put in her way. Aunt Ettie called on family in England for help. A cousin was happy to lend her the funds she needed, and Aunt Ettie had a great trip. Only when she returned to Jamaica did she even mention to family here the loss she had suffered.

Aunt Ettie showed us how useless it was to allow yesterday, with its joys or pains, to keep us from enjoying today.

Yes, the joys of yesterday can hold us back if we allow them to do so. Some of us, when we are at school, forget that the good report was about yesterday’s work. We need to know that today is a different day with new things to learn if we want to keep growing.

It seemed as if no one could beat Jamaica’s Usain Bolt after he broke the world record at the 100 metres sprint race. However, he recently had a reminder of how different yesterday is from today. A runner from the USA, Tyson Gay, recently ran faster than Usain in a race.

Today is the day, my grandniece. The Romans used to say, “Carpe diem”. That means “capture the day.” May we, like Uncle Mass and Aunt Ettie, live fully in the present.

Blessings,

Your shangazi Nothango (Yvonne)

Coming together to run far

When you run alone, you run fast. When you run together, you run far. (Zambia)

Jamaicans have run fast when they seem to run alone. Usain Bolt, fastest man in the world, proves how fast we can be. True enough, Tyson Gay ran faster than Bolt yesterday, but I have no doubt that Bolt will be back charging into the tape faster than any other in his race.

We Jamaicans run well in almost every race we enter. In athletics, we have won more medals than countries much bigger than we are. In music, we have Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, and a long, long list of others who are famous in every corner of the globe. Some have made their mark as doctors, soldiers, and politicians. For example, we have Ben Carson (neurosurgeon), Colin Powell (former American chief of staff and Secretary of State), and Yvette Clarke (American congresswoman), and Diane Abbott (aiming to lead the British Labour Party). So we know we can run faster than anyone else, when we choose.

In our communities, we have seen that we can run far when we run together. For example, when Jamaicans first settled in England, they met racism. Whites didn’t want to rent or sell them places where they could live and raise their families. It was hard for Blacks to find an apartment in a safe area with its own bathroom and kitchen, let alone its own front door and space for children to play.

So here is how many of those Jamaicans decided to run together in order to run far. They piled up in the slum apartments and saved their money together. This is a system in Jamaica known as “pardner”. People form a group in which each person contributes a set amount of money. One person is the banker, and this person makes sure all the money comes in and one person each month gets a “draw” – the total sum handed in by all the others in the “pardner”.

The first person who had enough from the “draw” would buy a house, and the others would move into rooms in that house until they had a “draw” that allowed them to buy their own house. The “pardner” would run until everyone had shelter that gave them a feeling of dignity. Before they had their homes, no banks would lend them money. However, with their own homes, they had a better chance of getting loans from banks.

“Pardner” schemes have worked for years, and many Jamaicans still rely on “pardner” to help them do what they cannot do alone. However, these schemes are really for individual benefit. As a result, individuals have run fast, but Jamaica as a whole seems left behind.

I hope, my grandniece, that together we can find ways of running far as a country, even while helping individuals to continue to run fast. And let us remember that those who run fast, like Usain Bolt, never really run alone. They have a team that helps them to run (and win) race after race.

Blessings,

Your shangazi