You will accumulate wisdom with age, they said. You have the impatience of youth; wait until you mature, they promised. Things will start to make more sense as you grow older, they insisted while nodding sagely.
Well, "they" are pathological liars, the whole lot of them. I am about seven months away from my 48th birthday and life makes far less sense than any other point in my existence.
How many times have you encountered an individual who was grumpy for no reason you could fathom? The other morning I walked into Clicks in a jovial mood, slapped my purchases on the counter, greeted the lady chirpily, and tried to pay with my credit card. The card must have been baabalazed from the night before because it yawned and refused. So I fished out some notes and paid. It happens all the time, right?
The cashier was not impressed, muttering something about people "who think they have made it in life". On any other day, this story ends in a screaming match. Instead, I smiled and said: "Thank you. I hope your day gets better."
This is totally out of character. I'm a notoriously petty and cantankerous man-child. But I can explain. In the 0.3 seconds that it took for me to decide whether to bring out my ghetto, Mpumalanga township-raised, ratchet inner self or to take the Jesus-inspired, slap the other cheek high road, I remembered an important life lesson I received from a friend.
After I was done yelling at him, he demurely said, 'Maybe the dude is pressed and needs to go desperately'
We were stuck in Durban traffic when I spotted a fellow in a bakkie climbing the kerb and proceeding to threaten the lives of pedestrians, just to escape the traffic jam. After I was done yelling at him, he demurely said, "Maybe the dude is pressed and needs to go desperately."
It would amaze you just how often that thought will help me get through encounters with folks who are behaving like rectal orifices for no discernable reason. Just think to yourself, "Ag shame man, I think he needs to poop pretty badly."
Humans, as a collective, give each other way too much respect when it comes to speculating about what drives our behaviour. You see it all the time on social media. A soapie actor recently suffered a public meltdown on Twitter over some fellow knobbing his wife. The Twitter folks were offering all manner of theories about what elicited the outburst including childhood trauma, racism, male toxicity and repressed anger.
I don't know about all that. Maybe when he tweeted all that stuff he was just a little constipated. Go on, ridicule me, but how many times have you been having a really bad day until you went to the bathroom, had a beautiful purge, and walked out feeling like a million bucks?
We don't acknowledge life's minor irritations as drivers of our behaviour. Have you ever had a popcorn kernel stuck between your teeth with no dental floss in sight? Do you not spend the day trying to dislodge it using a toothpick, your nails, paper from the printer and a staple? Am I lying if I tell you that before the day is over, you lose it and end up telling Ntombi from Finance that it was Judy from Sales who broke her "I (heart) Jamaica" mug?
No? Okay. Tell me this only happens to me. You're having a terrible day; everyone is annoying. Every conversation seems like it's suffocating you. At some point you realise you're walking funny. This is when it occurs to you that your undergarments feel funny. They're bunched up all wrong in that crevice between the upper thigh and the groin and have nestled into a wedgie between your cheeks.
All this time you've been thinking you're having a bad day, meanwhile you've just been suffering through a wedgie.
The human brain is not wired to accept that we are influenced by minor irritations. I have no doubt that wars and other human-made calamities in history were triggered by stupid, miscellaneous irritations.
I cannot think of too many things more annoying than minding your own business when a mini sandstorm just starts swirling around you from nowhere
I cannot think of too many things more annoying than minding your own business when a mini sandstorm just starts swirling around you from nowhere with sand entering your eyes, nose, mouth and every other crevice.
It then occurs to me that I do not have a recollection of a time when there was no war in the Middle East in my lifetime. Coincidence? I think not. It makes no bloody sense to me why Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, leading to the first Gulf War.
Surely, as delusional as he was, Saddam understood that this act would ultimately lead to his demise. What I suspect happened is that on August 2 1990, Saddam took off his military fatigues, walked onto the balcony to sunbathe in the nude a little, got caught in a hectic sandstorm and was busy trying to remove sand from his crack when Comical Ali walked in and said, "Oh Great One, the people want to know what we're doing about those uppity Kuwaities."
Last Saturday I took part in a 9.44km hike that was filled with challenges, including an upset tummy from what I suspect was brandy poisoning. Around the 8km mark it finally dawned on me why I was so uncomfortable. I had a tiny pebble in my shoe. That's all. To say the last kilometre was a breeze is an understatement.
I like to end my columns with some kind of point. Maybe it's that we should all have tiny placards made, warning everyone about what minor irritations plague us. I just printed one out. It reads "Proceed with caution. Popcorn kernel stuck between teeth."
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