Love and Peace

Today I baked dark chocolate cookies in a waffle iron. Four-and-a-half waffle cookies that were not waffles. Scoffing the two-and-a-bit with some rooibos tea for company. It was perhaps a silent cry and a peace offering to the self contemplating the idea and fear of how to react to losing a friendship.

We live on this planet of diversity. With time as a natural progression, the fact that a growing distance could develop seems inevitable. Our lives become influenced by time and space, a gap in age and probably most of all a departure from sharing the same thinking on issues. Our memories become riddled with keeping the best bits as it suits us individually and as time moves on it is either a process of injustice collection, broken recollections or leaving everything to the oblivion of yesteryear. Why bother to want to go back and remember the mundane, the complex, the challenges and the triumphs? I guess it is critical if we choose not to cling too much to the ‘what was or the ‘what could have been’s’. There will be too much pain to be nurtured on the lieu of the losses incurred. Time gradually runs out to chase opportunities that might never come along.

Listening to a survivor of the Nazi holocaust made me draw parallels with the losses incurred through the brutality of the Apartheid Regime, our own version of social, economic, cultural and political oppression riddled with the perils of the ultimate injustice - not allowing people to be persons in their own right and identity.

All the more the contemplation and pain of coming to the realisation that in life, we sometimes have to make peace with people choosing to move on. Losing friendship and a bit of that sense of  “I am, because you are.”

We can easily draw parallels between what happened to the Jews in World War II and the continuous persecution of so many in war, racial conflicts, territorial disputes (etc…), but nothing can change the pain experienced by the survivors and those who suffered – who made the ultimate sacrifice of losing their lives.

Love and peace is more than a dream. Sometimes it is an internal struggle and the core of battles with those around us. The search for Love and Peace moves us beyond me and connects us to live in communion as we.

Simone Beatrice Naik Hagfeldt, 29 January 2015.