This lucky life

I wrote (rambled) last time and spoke briefly about my desire to have a place I can call home, a base for my family. Two days later, 40,000 people were displaced to make way for a mega-highway through Nairobi, Kenya. Homes, schools and businesses bulldozed, already poor people losing everything, given only three days notice before the felling began.

I feel so sick. These are the news stories — and they come thick and fast, all the time — which pain my soul. The myriad of social injustices that need to occur, from national to local level, in the relentless pursuit of development and false economic growth. People are collatoral and poor people less than that.

I’m not alone in this frustration and despair. Deep and terrifying as it is, I will again get up tomorrow, feed and clothe my family within the comfortable setting of our rented house. The Global South will bear the brunt of a changing climate and all our children will suffer the worst consequences. The bloated, developed nations belch on their holiday excesses, desperate to hide behind baubles and glitter.

To say that this last two years, 2020 and 2021, have been transformative is both a truth and a lie. Living through the latest global pandemic is an interesting time to be. The political responses, crisis management and money-printing, have shown a swiftness long forgotten in the daily bureaucracies of democracy. Here lies our modern life, so easily frayed and ugly under the surface.

Society is polarised, but perhaps that’s just the algorithmic progression of the news feed pushing outwardly to the extremes. My conversations daily revolve around change and postive ways forward. I am not alone in feeling rattled and charred. I stand with others who walk with heavy hearts and who cry for those they will never know.

We must remind ourselves we all exist. There is so much noise that we can’t always hear. Yet there we are, picking litter, planting trees, being a companion, caring, sharing, standing together, writing and talking, planning and building, creating and growing. Neighbourhoods and communities, across the planet, in different cultures and in different ways, making these positive changes.

I listen to Farhana Yamin and Ed Gillespie and remind myself that what I hold in my heart is the strongest thing. Although it weighs heavily sometimes, grief and loss can be found only through love. Like the loss of my parents, jagged stories that pierce my heart find their place in my soul. I carry them and am reminded (weirdly) of Philip Larkin’s, This Be The Verse.