OPINION: What is the rush for change?

One of the most interesting of things is studying human beings and trying to make sense of their actions even when that seems to make less sense than it does make sense.

You have to ask why we are as impatient as we are of late!

It is very difficult to find someone who has held the same phone for the last seven years, in fact the thought that that has been done would be frowned upon.

In any case what has become the in thing and of value is how often we change things.

Sticking to an item is being made to appear a sign of one being stingy and unwilling to move with the times. Remember there is a huge cost attached to this moving with the times!

I am speaking of a generation that just can’t stay in one job for five years? You are asked whether you don’t have options. It just does not make sense anymore that someone can be happy to be in one place for 30 years.

I spoke to Mr. Matembe who worked for the brewery for over thirty years and I am sure I loved that idea. It does not help that our politics has also crept into the idea of longevity and any time you argue or make a case for longevity you are ascribed a political side.

But as a scholar of Biblical Theology, I am familiar with the phrase “The Ancient of Days” and it is used in a very positive sense. Before you even decide that I am on a mission to defend an individual and his firm grip on power believe you me my mind is on something completely tangent to that idea.

Can we argue that those who can’t keep their rented accommodation for years are the people we must emulate? Shall we now accept and follow they that dispose of cars in perfect working order simply because they just have to change or because they were told they need to? Is it now acceptable as a new value to change simply because one is just bored with the same thing? I am very concerned that I emcee weddings and, in a few months, if not weeks the couple have parted ways. Why are we not able to keep anything for long anymore?

Many years ago they that spoke Latin left us with some wisdom “Repetitio est mater studiorum’ translated Repetition is the mother of all learning. The idea here is that if you want to learn anything you simply have to repeat it enough times.

We cannot have patience with each other if in our live there aren’t enough patterns of things we’ve repeated to gain and experience in patience. This is the reason I don’t change school for my girls when they want me to because my fear is they won’t learn to be patient. I want then to learn to keep at something against all odds. I want them to practice patience long enough to me able to grow it as a value in their lives…Patience is not born! It is learned through practice and that is not easy.

As I intimated early on, we are with a generation that has not had many opportunities to repeat things so they frown at having the same things over and over again. See how we’ve lost the value for marriage and having the same partners for 40 years? Men drove cars for 35 years. Now that your world releases a new phone every six months, how can you value keeping things?

I am asked every so often when I shall leave my TV job simply because I am 49…The US and UK have anchors who are in their sixties and seventies…

We clearly have a problem we don’t even know.

I am for patience with people and things and I am sure this is the age old wisdom.