On the Couch with CA

With just little over a month to go before this year, 2013 ends, I start to look back at it and how far I have come in such a short space of time, compared to the 48 years I have been around - it is quite remarkable. Every day is a challenge, but it is a challenge that always comes with a lesson.  Just waking up and deciding that today is the day to just let go and let God, the universe, or whoever we decide determines our life to take control can be a very hard one. Far too often we find ourselves wanting to control every situation, every minute of every day.  Sometimes we just need to let go and let it be. In the words of my daughter "you have OCD".  Of course when one has this you don't know it.  So I had to look it up. Yes I guess that is one I did not know.  "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder".  Bloody nerve to come and tell me I have OCD just because, the mat is slightly skew, or there is speck of dirt on the tiles, or the coffee table is too f...

As it is not in my nature to keep quiet when faced with issues related to discrimination, inequality, crude comments about the country I live in, let alone a man who sacrificed his personal life alongside many others, who I have known personally and indirectly, to allow the following comment from a certain David Cocks who commented on Sir Richard Branson's blog about "Mandela's Way" to go unanswered.   David Cocks had this to say in his comment: "I was living in South Africa at the time when Nelson Mandela was the chief motivator for the ANC as well as the major influence for APLA and various other anti-white organisations.  He was the force behind indescribable murders and torture carried out on innocent white people who very often were employers of black staff on farms and in other business.  Their deaths left vast numbers of black families unemployed and homeless apart from the actual brutality of the callous murders themselves.  Before slapping Mad...

He sailed the seven seas from Cape Town to Antarctica, and many other places, but always returning to the pub down the road before making his way home to face the "music" .   This was the travels of my father. I never got to know my father very well but for the time that he was around, I did get to spend some time with him.  According to my siblings and mother, I was his favourite, and was tasked with asking him anything whenever someone wanted something.  Perhaps it was not I who was his favourite, but that I had the courage to ask.  I have learned that if you don't let someone know your needs, you are not going be open to receiving. I remember him taking me to work with him when he worked at Freddy Hirsch and then to ballet class on a Saturday morning in Plein Street and going for lunch at the Entertainer afterwards, where we sat and had viennas and chips.  One Saturday we sat and had lunch with some woman and her son.  I guess my father knew her...

I recently posted on Facebook a request for topics to write on, and a friend and ex (won't say "old" for fear of a nasty comeback comment) classmate, suggested I write my views of freeing the mind.  So considering that I usually have an opinion on almost every subject under the sun (No!  I am not a Miss Know it All) here is my view on freeing the mind which is open for debate.  I personally don't think that we can actually free our mind unless we are prepared to block out everything that goes on around us.  We are constantly bombarded with advertisements from a number of sales companies trying to sell us something because it is going to make us more beautiful, thinner, richer, healthier, or even confident.  We worry about our families, our work about the neighbours having something better than we do. Then we have politicians and religious leaders all trying to condition us into thinking and behaving in a certain way.  Not to mention, society bre...