Letter 2 - eThembeni

 Happy Sunday 2021,

Let's talk about hope today. Let's talk about how your timeline has proven to me, time and time again, that for me hope comes in the morning. I have no qualms with joy coming in the morning. It does. Hope just beats joy to it. Beke le beke!

Hope is like that friend that you have but you can't pin to exactly when you became friends. I have a couple of those. They are normally the ones who come and just stick around. The interesting thing though, is that you never stop wondering when the friendship began.

My brother's name is Themba. It means hope. I've almost never used the name to call him. The ten, almost eleven, year gap between us has always required a prefix. We are big on prefixes here in Africa. So, I call him bhut'Themba. I guess this was my first encounter with the concept of "hope". I've always seen it from an authoritative perspective. Adulting is making me appreciate the authority is currently holds.

2021, your darkest pages made me stick close to my friendship with Hope. Hope is fierce and unapologetic. Hope is kinder than my inner critic. Hope is bold enough to stand up to anxiety when life gets lit. Hope consistently shows up for me. Hope has my back.

I have one regret about our friendship. I regret that most of the time, I'm hoping against the negative. I'm hoping against a bad day or things going wrong. I wish I could lean towards the positive. To hope that I make the most of each day or to hope that I am kinder...especially to myself. To hope that I accept things as they are and not as I think they should be.

On a lighter note, I found so much solace in the "eThembeni" state of mind. Dankie Mpura! Let's keep this one for my stan list. 

That being said, 2021 please help me raise a glass to my dear friend Hope. She is always right...