Just saying: KINDNESS and ACTIVITY

By Maeder Osler

Having just returned – once again — from stark and seemingly simple Karoo landscapes to teeming and seemingly complex cityscapes, I am cautiously sceptical about metropolitan Stoep Talks, Messages and Just Sayings.

Nevertheless, I have been intrigued and even pleasantly surprised by a billboard along the N2 near Cape Town International Airport, carrying – against a backdrop of shacks, a sea of TV satellite dishes, and endless traffic – the following three huge words: JUST BE KIND.

This Billboard Stoep Talk message reminds me of a modest little booklet rediscovered this week by a local Toverview researcher. Titled Everyday Psychology, it comprises a collection of 101 sayings, selected and commented on by Dr Steve Edwards, a former head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Zululand in Kwadlangezwa. It was published without fanfare by Spatzennest Publications in Mtunzini in distant 1990, and reprinted in 1994.

It sports a cheerful yellow logo of a rising sun on its cover, and is small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. The flyleaf carries a personal hand-written message to our researcher: ‘Thank you for your care …’, signed ‘Edwards family’.

While this has to be yet another story, it reminds me of my mother’s difficult passing here in Somerset West in the 1980s, and of so many other folk who happen to cling to simple sayings like JUST BE KIND, weaving hopefully through their ways and days. So what has changed, you might be tempted to ask?

This is why I welcome a Toverview Waenhuis window of opportunity to explore some of these sayings, in the belief that ‘everyday psychology’ is a missing link in the vast metropolitan networks of high-powered universities, overlapping disciplines, conflicting approaches and ideologies, and individual-communal, private-public relations, on all sides of the highways.

The booklet starts with a saying headed ACTIVITY, which reads: ‘If nothing is worth doing, then everything is worth doing well, because activity provides its own worth.’

Edwards then comments: ‘Apathy, depression and boredom are common existential problems of our contemporary modern world. One way to handle such problems is to change our thinking about them as Edward de Bono has indicated in this saying. De Bono has defined thinking as the exploration of experience for a purpose. Aaron Beck has shown that depression may be caused by negative and over self-critical evaluation which can be changed through changing one’s thinking. There are many other ways: medication, religion, physical exercise etc.’

That’s it folks – the first entry, echoing those three words, JUST BE KIND. The next one is ADULTHOOD, followed by AGE, ALIENATION and ATMOSPHERE. So watch this space … more to follow …