WHENRUNNING THE HIGH SPIRIT RACE - CHARACTER IS DESTINY

The potholes in my life are there for me to appreciate the beautiful highway – MothupiKgopa

My life’s odyssey can be summarised in four challenges or should I say “character showcasing exercises”: losing my father at a tender age, stepping on a spiky thorn and loosing the use of my foot, lacking funds to further my studies after matric and, lastly, being unemployed after graduating from Wits University. One could have agreed with me in those days when I vented out my frustrations and said, “If God heard and answered any prayers, he could have started with me.” Allow me to say that God was at work, and allow me to narrate what that means and how those challenges have crafted the better person than I am today. You might be a student, graduate or just a fellow member of church with challenges – I ask God as I write this to help me give you the Godly perspective.

It will be disfavour if I began this without calling one of the songs I love from Tyler Perry’s “The Family that Preys” movie – “I hope you dance.” Here are the words that made an impression on me: “I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance. Never settle for the path of least resistance. Living might mean taking chances but they’re worth taking.”

POVERTY CHOSE ME AND I REJECTED HIM

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behindand straining toward what is ahead,I press ontoward the goal to win the prizefor which God has calledme heavenward in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:13-14

When I was very young and everything was normal in a family of seven with an educated father and uneducated mother, that automatically put me in a typical South African family of the 80s where fathers were supposed to provide economic resources for their families while the mothers provided housekeeping duties.

My joy to see my father coming back from Johannesburg would come to a halt when one day coming back home I was asked to come and greet my father who was sitting on a chair -immobile. My naiveté would not afford me sufficient intelligence to see that my father was hit by stroke and could not walk. I remember vividly taking my end of the year report to my father lying on his bed – he nodded his head and smiled...“Well done”. One day when I came back home, my father was sitting on his wheelchair sleeping – that was his very last sleep.

Once again my naiveté as a child could not afford me the intelligence to see that my father was no more. His passing introduced another era in our family of seven. It meant that my mother had to go looking for work to fend for her seven children. It also meant that my mother had to play the mother and father figure at the same time. Being the hard worker that my mother was and still is; she took it upon her shoulders to put the food on the table for us.

The only job she could find was that of a housewife in Mankweng, and during her spare time she would get boxes of vegetables and fruits for us to sell. Palpably, we were officially very poor. Let me begin by saying I couldn’t have had it any other way. I am a proud poverty scholar. It was during those days that my life had begun. But allow me to paint the picture with more colours. It was in those days that I was introduced to going to school in torn shoes with holes and thumbs hinting the need for fresh air, and in sepedi, “Jersey ya go lapa, ebile e jegile mo dikung. Le marokgo a digaswa, o hwetseborokgobofedilesegwaswa se tletsepoleke.” It was obvious to everyone, we were poor. I was young, but the moment when other kids come to school in neat and new uniform, shoes, and pocket money and fancy lunch boxes you don’t have a choice but to see that they come from a very different family – the one better off financially than your own.

The fact of the matter is that my mother could not sustain us all in a one room house with seven children. Some of my brothers had to stay with other relatives and my grandmother chose me to come and stay with her and my aunt. It is there that life denied me the chance to go play soccer with other children. It is there that I was denied the pleasure of young people in puberty – as I had to look after my grandfather’s cattle.

There were places in ThabakgoneMountains where I enjoy spending my time. I enjoyed Sehlolelong, MorakaMampshe, and MagagaMatala because from the latter I could see far and wide into the horizon where the mountains of Makgeng met the clouds and on the other side where Polokwane met the clouds. These places triggered a motion of thought and my mind went fishing, but the number one question I had to grapple with was always the same, “Why am I so poor.” My principal at the assembly, NyambeniSekhwari, offered a solution not the answer to my question, he said that, “To be born in poverty is not your choice, but to die in poverty is your choice.” Sekgwari was himself raised in poverty and I felt compelled to admit that he walked the path and he should be listened to.

If I knew then, what I know now, I would have told anyone who would have cared to listen that when running the race of life we must all remember that, “character is destiny.” An American author, advertising executive and politician Bruce Fairchild Barton offered a better understanding to life and becoming bigger than poverty. He said that, “All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.”

The view from the ThabakgoneMountains said to me that my eyes could only take me as far as I could see, to be anywhere beyond the limit of my eyes meant that another skill in life had to be developed – the power of visualisation. I could see myself walking the streets of Wits University. I could see my university friends, happy, hardworking, intelligent and dreaming big. Visualisation took me to the place where I had a car, a house, a wife and children. God also played a pivotal role in driving my sights to faraway lands. One day when I was feeling sick, distraught and gloomy - God would have none of that. He called me and told me that “Lefase le lenabile” in those exact words. I knew then and there that I had a life ahead of me. When fellow church members sang, “O a lebonanaalesedi,” mine shone brighter. Poverty stopped having any bearing on what I decided to do in my life. My life took another turn, and I knew to go anywhere great I had to get good results, just so that I could push my luck. The youth today stop pushing the boundaries of what is possible for them by not getting education.

Education is nothing for me but a tool to expand your possibilities and opportunities. All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances – that for me means a bigger character – the art of knowing that circumstances and challenges will always come to pass. When I was at Wits University, one lady once said to me, “Don’t worry about things that are going to change,” that defined character for me.

When LudwickMamabolo won the 98km comrades marathon race, he won more than just a race. He proved to himself that he can set a task and complete it. He showed character when going uphill, and capitalised when he went downhill. It was his will and character that kept him going even when voices said something else, “you are still far and you are tired.” He silenced those voices – coming from Mamabolo is more than just a win. It is one of the stories that all the champions narrate to those who would care to analyse them, “When running the race of life – “character is destiny.” Let us for a moment indulge in the behind scenes. Mamabolo had to train hard and delay the gratification of a good morning sleep. The gratification of meeting friends and the opportunity cost of spending time with family. For Mamabolo to win, he had to have a tough mind. Such is the story of life.

The Apostle Paul said, “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. I press ontoward the goal to win the prizefor which God has calledme heavenward in Christ Jesus.” What we are and what we have achieved is nothing compared to what we are capable of achieving. We can always strive to be greater!

Under the tutelage of his voice

He spoke to me during the night, he moulded me, and in his wise words I found peace

You can become your own enemy

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one's own sunshine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today in retrospect, I realise that God was at work. In those days when we went door to door selling tomatoes, we were introduced to one of the most important skills in business – sales. We knew rejection from a very early age and after a year we became very efficient at selling and we started competing amongst each other to see who would come back first with an empty basket. So we had to know our customers very well. That analysis is very important in business – knowing your market. We were very young doing the market analysis and we did not even know it. Selling tomatoes and avocadoes in those days set the play ground for us to learn important business skills that would serve us later in life. It set the ground to fail, fail and fail until failure is polished into success.

That also introduced us to wanting things that we could not have – willpower and the burning desire are important elements in life and in business. It was my mother who gave me a strange answer when I asked her to give me money for shoes, she looked at me and said, “Mothupi yours is to go to school, end of story.” Dedication and commitment in education was internalised from a very young age as a tool to getting things I wanted. All these elements introduced the entrepreneur in me. In standard 5, all my friends would come to buy ice blocks made and managed by me. That was my first business – selling ice blocks made from Sweeto and sometimes Sizo. At that age I learnt what commission and profit meant.

Life also challenged me to be at the forefront of my own economic battles – now I could afford to buy better lunch at school. God was at work because I learnt to be responsible for my own finances at a very your age and became a very independent thinker. At that age, when other kids asked for money, I looked for solutions, I became the problem poser and problem solver. That heralded the mathematician that I would later become in life. Of paramount importance was the fact that I became a person who would ask of life to give, and I would go to work to make it happen.

Today people know that no one can ever out-perform their self-image. Mine was a strong character and self-image – that drove my performance in everything I did. I saw my life as it unfolded in my own imagination, and silently in total faith said, “One day I shall say goodbye to poverty. Deep down I know I was never destined to be poor. Come rain come shine, with the help of God, this shall come to pass.” Maxwell Maltz said, “Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment,” and I share the same sentiments. To further internalise this, let’s indulge in Jonathan Edwards’s perspective on character, “The surest way to know our gold, is to look upon it and examine it in God's furnace, where he tries it that we may see what it is. If we have a mind to know whether a building stands strong or not, we must look upon it when the wind blows. If we would know whether a staff be strong, or a rotten, broken reed, we must observe it when it is leaned on and weight is borne upon it. If we would weigh ourselves justly we must weigh ourselves in God's scales that he makes use of to weigh us."

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT – when little changes means a lot

A butterfly flapping its wings in San Francisco can change the weather pattern in Shanghai

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. One day, while analyzing weather patterns, Lorenz left his computer terminal to get a cup of coffee. When he returned, he saw that his data points had gone haywire. A small change in his calculations had produced a major swing in his forecasts. That got him to thinking. And in a 1972 speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he posed a rhetorical question, 'Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? What began as a rhetorical question by a meteorologist has turned into a metaphor for the importance of small things. The butterfly effect as a metaphor stresses that small things can be important building factors for much greater things. It was small changes in my life that moulded the person I would become later in life.

After I stepped on a spiky thorn in standard one, I spent the whole year not able to walk. God was at work still. I had to juxtapose myself and the children in the community and at school. At that early age, life said to me that we were very different. Accepting myself as someone who could not walk was a major blow, but I embraced it. Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer once said, “Everybody is unique. Compare not yourself with anybody else lest you spoil God’s curriculum.” God revealed to me that I was very unique at that age. God said, “This is you, don’t spoil my curriculum by wanting to be like them.”

To get to school I had to wake up earlier than everybody – it was mission “don’t spoil the curriculum of God”. Since I could not play, my time was used looking at the horizon thinking deeply about how I wanted my life to be different. Deep in thoughts I mapped out what I wanted in life, other kids did not have the time to kick start their imagination process, and to ponder over their future. I was finally allowed the opportunity to see myself in my own eyes not those of others. There is an adage by Neale Donald Walsch, “So long as you are still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.” I owned my life because I asked no approval from outside myself. I was Mothupi, the boy who could not walk without a helping stick. So it was a double wormy for me: leaping in poverty. That was the butterfly effect in my life. Those small changes in your life must be analysed. The number one question should always be, “Are these small changes taking me where I want to go.” If not, change course immediately. To drive this point home, allow me to share what Jimmy Dean said, “I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust mysailsto always reach my destination.” The moment you choose to study, you are making small changes. The moment you decide to go to church, you are making small changes. The moment you change negative friends, you are making small changes. The moment you start doing drugs, you are making small changes but not in the same direction.

Jimmy Dean said that we must always adjust, and readjust to go to our destiny. Heunderstood the power of the butterfly effect in a very big way, and so should you. Someone might say, “But other people started off with drugs and alcohol, but ended up becoming successful.” I agree that happens, but no one drinks the poison and survive so that they can realise they can start following their dreams. Realise now what your dreams are, and follow the correct path to get there. If you have found yourself in a situation you do not like, change you are not a tree. Even trees can grow strong and taller.

APPLY YOURSELF

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
- Chinese Proverb

No one buys character from the Spaza Shop. It is not sold in major retail outlets and no one can be bribed to give it to you even for a billion dollars. To be a person of character - apply yourself. Set your sight on shores far ahead, and go for it. The art of developing a strong character lives in not just falling, but waking up after every fall. It is the total knowledge that failure is the integral part of success. It that knowledge put into action, and that means one would never be crippled after failing, but by not trying again in fear of failure.

The Chinese said it best, to move a mountain; it must be done one stone at a time. Someone said that to eat an elephant, you must do it one piece at a time. Apply yourself. Each day when you wake up, you are one step away from yesterday and one step towards your goals. Each day as you awake, decide to take it a step at a time and move just one stone towards your destiny. To survive after falling in water, rests upon the total realisation that you don’t drown by falling in the water but by staying there. That takes character.