EPISODES
Here’s what I wanted to write today. I wanted to go on about waves: how life is like the sea, how tides are pulled by the phases of the moon, how waves can be reassuring or terrifying, just like life. I do love a good metaphor and the sea holds many, doesn’t it?
However.
That’s not for today. It feels too much like platitudes, like being wise and sitting up on a mountain and philosophizing, doesn’t it?
The truth is that life, right now, requires an entirely different metaphor. All of us, whether we like it or not, are just in it right now, aren’t we? I don’t think there is a place you can completely hide away from all the chaos and rapid shifting that’s going on. I’ll leave it to others, the astrologers and historians, to try to explain all of that.
Here's what I will say, though. Life has become a whole lot like television lately. And like old school TV, at that.
Back in the day, when I was young and shortly after the dinosaurs had gone extinct, television series were put out episode by episode. There was no such thing as binge-watching. Imagine that. You tuned in, often the whole family sitting in one room with the youngest turning the channels using a knob on the actual TV, which was a box – 3D and not flat but curved. Hard to imagine, I know, but trust me, that’s how it was before anyone knew what a remote control was or even dreamed of scrolling.
Each show had maybe twenty-six episodes in one season with a cliff hanger at the end which left you wondering what had, indeed, happened to JR or whoever, for months at a time. You had to wait. And wait. And often you’d sort of forget, only to be reunited with your favourite characters, falling in love with them all over again, months later. And here’s the thing – there was no catching up with the previous season, only scouring the little TV Guide magazine to try and find the reruns. Those, of course, often ran in the wee hours of the morning so only the most dedicated fans seemed to watch them. Still, even with those gaps, we would tune in each Friday night at 7 pm to watch Sonny and Cher or on Thursday evenings to find out if the patient from last week pulled through on ER – or Dr Kildare, MD, if you’re old enough.
It’s fun, of course, to reminisce but what does all that have to do with life in 2025?
In short, everything.
That’s what we are living collectively, right now. Episodes. In South Africa, our little corner of the world at the bottom of the globe, we wake each morning to tune in online and catch glimpses of what happened yesterday in the US. We watch sound bites and clips of the ramblings by the occupant of the White House, the government representatives, the people being mistreated for no real reason. We see devastation from the Middle East and the world’s responses (or lack thereof). With little to no control in our own individual hands, it seems, we watch as our world changes before our very eyes. As those in history have done over and over, for eons now.
Change doesn’t happen in the blink of an eye. It happens in episodes. And we keep watching. The trick is not to stay paralyzed in between episodes. To carry on with your own life, to love those around you, to do some good each day and to give your own body, mind and soul what they need. To breathe.
The beauty of episodes is not in the show itself. Not really. It’s in the gaps which allow us to decide what kind of life we want. Whether we want to be swept up in the drama, add to the chaos or perhaps bring some peace to the world. We get to choose.
We get to decide how we want to navigate this life, our world, and all the beauty and pain it contains. And in doing so, we shape it. We create the next season, for better or worse. Individually and as a species. As one human race.
We each have far more power than we like to recognize. Let’s use it to build something good.
It's time.
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