Category: Emotional Work

Often, the thing that will benefit us the most is the hardest. It’s also likely the thing that we’ve been avoiding for months, years, or decades.

If it’s really hard to stay away from sugar, then that’s probably a priority. If a certain exercise is really hard, that’s probably the thing that will yield significant gains. If we tend to avoid difficult conversations with a certain person, it’s likely that this tendency has caused some buried resentments and internal knots.

I tend to stay away from political topics. This is because I don’t see politics as a root problem. I see it as a bad fruit problem, stemming from rotten roots.

But I wanted to write this post because I think someone might need to hear this.

The question of whether Afrikaners should leave, is not a new one, but it has been revisited recently because of certain political events. I won’t get into the details of this. I will only share a few thoughts.

I recently re-potted some house plants because of root rot.

If the roots of a plant aren’t healthy, there is nothing that you can do to make the plant thrive. No perfect amount of water or sun will fix the problem. Fertilizer will worsen the situation. The rotten roots must be removed for things to improve.

This is a great analogy for many things that we attend to on a consistent basis. A charged and uncomfortable emotional body is often at the root of recurring problems. Yet, we never attend to the root—the actual uncomfortable emotion. We try to avoid it. Or we try to paint over it with endless doings. Interventions. Debating. Thinking.