Life is hard at times, like old-fashioned nicker balls. The temptation is to just get stuck, lie down and accept.
I’ve been wrestling with “mindfulness” for the past month or so. I try to teach people to live more aware. Awareness is the most important building block of growth and development.
While I was browsing through the newspaper on Netwerk24’s portal, I came across an article that I noticed last weekend but that I didn’t read. It was an interview that Hanlie Retief had with Akani Simbine after he and his friends won silver during the final of the 4x100m relay during the 2024 Olympic Games. He called himself the “almost man” who missed medal positions by fractions of seconds and just couldn’t walk away with that medal.
Tokyo was the turning point. He wanted to put an end to everything. He was just not good enough. A medal was the identity he strove for, and he just didn’t make it. Gone was his identity. It became NOTHING. He had nothing to show for all his hard work.
Then came the 2024 Olympics. Again NOTHING, fractions of seconds too late. But he was a very different Akani. Relaxed, with a wide white smile and there he and his teammates won silver in the 4x100m relay race.
What does this story have to do with “awareness”?
Just dare to seize the moment. Just dare to look deep within yourself to find how you are undermining yourself. Dare to be deeply honest with yourself so that you can shed the ego, the pretense, the false identity.
In what do you anchor your identity? What do you do in the eyes of the spectators that is good and right, so that you can receive a “medal” for it? What does the medal you would like to win look like?
Maybe all of us need to hang around for two weeks like Akani Simbine and feel sorry for ourselves to find (with help) the real you, a real purpose.
The “medal” is not your identity.
The “medal” is not you! Taking a stripped-down, honest look at who you really are is worth much more than standing in front of crowds with a gold medal. Winning the medal is not going to bring lasting happiness and contentment. It’s only temporary. It becomes dust, it gets forgotten when
the next person wins.
When we look with deep “awareness” at more than the public achievement, we begin to understand a legacy of joy, of inspiration and encouragement. Only then do we begin to understand that our human value does not lie in the exterior. This is not sustainable.
Therefore: play detective for yourself. Build a detective report as if you had to defend yourself in court. Get rid of the experience of inferiority. Live with an awareness from the gifts you have, to make the world around you a better place.
Dare to share your inherent worth to a broken world, a world that needs everyone’s unique gifts to heal and live productively.
Just dare it.