I'm 40 !!

Today, I was woken up by phone calls, text messages from old and new friends. I just thought about how precious it is, to be able to close out another decade, still alive. Many have gone before me; since July I have lost 4 friends, all in very unusual circumstances. Life is valuable and I intend to make the most of the next few decades so help me God : ). There are many lessons I have learned over the years and there are many more I still learn on a daily basis. Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with a friend; he walked into my office laughing, saying how pathetic it was for us to think we could actually change the world. We're both journalists and activists with varied backgrounds. He is significantly older than I am and has had much more experience working in the trenches, challenging governments. I sympathized as I realised that the work he had done over the years hadn't necessarily created the 'grand' change he had so hoped for. This happens to the best of us; we have a romanticized view of how we want the word to be like and how we could actually make it happen but the reality is change starts from the individual. You change one individual at a time and hopefully as their story changes, they attempt to change another individual. That's the way it works. Grand changes can happen when you have a critical mass of people who have come to together for a common cause but history has shown clearly that revolutions do not automatically lead to positive change; protests don't either. We can only keep at our work as individuals, groups and organisations, hoping that the seeds we plant in the lives of others will continue to be nurtured and eventually germinate and create a harvest but in the meantime, we will continue dreaming of a better world as we set out to change it, one person at a time.

It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.~Mahatma Gandhi