Krugersdorp is the source of all the drama in my life.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not. My story continues and as long as it continues it will carry the germ implanted there, in the place of my birth, which will lead to all the future dramas of my life.A new drama every day and all from Krugersdorp. This would be the byline of every day since I started to be aware of what was going on around me.
This time the drama isn't an event but a spiritual discovery which I made while looking back on my life in Krugersdorp.
My life was full of drama. Every day, I can even say every minute a new drama tossed me up to the high heavens or crashed me down to the depths of despair. I learned to expect disaster and despair. I didn't create the drama and I didn't even want it.
I think that I was famous for the saying "I didn't do it", or "it wasn't me" or "why do you always blame me" or the worst of all "I'm sorry I didn't mean to do it". My feelings were like a pendulum. At one and the same time I feared and desired everything that ever happened to me. I was always waiting for the drama, that disastrously big something that I was sure was going to happen.
The greatest drama that I could imagine was war. Being an avid reader of Superman and Captain Marvel. There was a short spell of comic relief when I discovered the William books. He was the original Dennis the Menace and I loved the antics and the humor.
I found it very difficult to read books like The Deerslayer, by James Fenimore Cooper. Only now I have plucked up enough courage to read those wonderful books and now I realize that the events described there were much too harsh for a young, kid, suffering the way I was in those distant days of my youth.
I could only tolerate comics that told of miraculous salvation and humorous stories.
I realized from the comics that there was some kind of struggle between good and evil, a sort of constant war.
I was disappointed that war never came to Krugersdorp. It was always somewhere else. If only it could come here and take me out of the turbulent waters of never ending drama at school, at home with my friends, everywhere. I felt unlucky that nothing would relieve my suffering.
Only my imagination took flight to the land of expectation, where one of these comic heroes would pop up and tell me that I had been selected to bear the magic powers that would save the world and through it me.
Today, after 76 years or so of waiting in vain, I've given up waiting. This doesn't mean that drama doesn't happen, on the contrary, drama happens all the time, but I'm not it's plaything anymore.
It took me all these years to realize that spiritual suffering comes to those who wait for the drama to happen.
Drama happens every day by waiting, as I was doing. All those long years of my life in Krugersdorp, blinded me to the meaning of the drama and that sometimes it can be good and sometimes it can be bad.
Today I know that the only good drama in my life will be created by me. I don't have to wait and I should never have been waiting all those years. That was plain dumb and a terrible waste and it lead to a lifetime of suffering.
Throughout all those years I didn't know that I could take initiative in my life.
Today I know that not only did I have the ability to take initiative but that nothing good happens unless I take the initiative; I make good drama by my initiative. Bad drama happens to those who wait.
When I think about this today I want to cry. I can't believe that I was as weird as all that, to sit around suffering while waiting for someone, Captain Marvel kind of, to tell me what to do.
Today I know that then and at any time in my life I could have done whatever I liked.
My big discovery is that people close to me, friends, parents, teachers etc will practically always object to me doing anything that they don't initiate.
I should have looked at my life as an unknown resource, buried underground, waiting to be discovered and extracted and used to give me energy, like coal, oil or any other energy resource that one can imagine. The difference is that my resource would have increased with use, unlike a fossil fuel that diminishes with use.
Everybody, the people close to me thought that they know what resource I consist of and in what quantity. This made them think that I can only do things that they tell me to do.
It's madness to accept this idea, because even I don't know what is my resource until I try to use it by taking initiative.