Twenty-Two Lessons for Now: A Guide to Crafting a Life of Meaning and Joy, 3rd Edition

By Trevor Waller

Change is a verb! Ultimately, the universe supports action. Without a conscious effort to be different and to do things differently, nothing will change.

In 2018, Trevor Waller wrote a book called The Lessons for his beloved niece who was relocating abroad after finishing high school. It contained 22 'lessons for life' – things Trevor had taught her along the way, and that he wanted his niece to carry with her.

 

When a twenty-one-day lockdown was announced in South Africa in response to Covid-19, Trevor realised that he had a lesson for each day (plus one extra). He decided to post a lesson a day, with a little Covid-19 'twist', on Facebook. The feedback was so overwhelmingly positive and encouraging that Trevor turned the posts into a blog and then into a book. Originally titled 22 Lessons for Corona Time & After, the book, now in its third edition, is Trevor's take on living with meaning and purpose.

Together with Trevor's personal stories, wisdom and wit, Twenty-Two Lessons for Now provides a way to survive and thrive in the post-Covid world. Now more than ever, we need to get creative, resourceful and, most importantly, embrace new ways of being, doing and having.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trevor Waller
• Release date: Oct 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9780639718125

Trevor Waller

Trevor Waller has worked in the fields of education and training as a teacher, educational writer, entrepreneurial trainer and learning academy head. He is an accomplished writer and ghostwriter. He currently practises as a logotherapist, coach and facilitator using a spiritual, meaning-based approach to support people in their personal development journeys.

Book preview

PROLOGUE:

Two ‘Pre-Lessons’

Even the Ten Commandments

had a First Draft

­— DAVID BOICE

In 2018, I wrote a book called ‘The Lessons’. It was written as a gift to my niece, Keshie, who was planning to travel overseas when she finished high school. It contained 22 ‘lessons for life’ – things I had learned and that I wanted her, and, eventually, my two younger nephews to carry with them. They were lessons that I had endeavoured to teach them over the course of their lives. I had also learned some of the lessons from them. The book sat on my laptop for two years as I busied myself with earning money and growing my business. I tried, but never succeeded, to take it further.

In 2020, when South Africa went into her initial twenty-one-day lockdown, in response to Covid-19, my opportunity-seeking brain connected ‘21 days’ and ‘22 lessons’. I decided to post one of these lessons on Facebook for every day of the lockdown, with a little Covid-19 ‘twist’ added to the mix. They were far from perfect, and not all original. I have learned so much from so many wise souls: I endeavoured, wherever possible, to acknowledge and credit these teachers. As I began posting my daily missives, so my Facebook friends began responding. Some of them began sharing the posts, and I began to get friend requests from strangers and comments from friends of friends. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and extremely encouraging. Lockdown was providing many people within my Facebook circle with time for introspection. The posts were landing and resonating. My joy at having created a daily ritual, filled with meaning and purpose, grew daily. Some days were hard, and I shared this openly.

I had long wanted to create a website, and the lockdown seemed as good a time as any to stop procrastinating. I am grateful to my friend Anton Olivier who rose to the challenge in record time. The posts became blogs, and then the blogs became the first edition of this book. I self-published the book, and printed a limited number of copies. Friends began buying it for their friends and soon their friends began asking for books. And then strangers began enquiring about where they could get copies. A school ordered 80 books for their teachers. The lessons were resonating for people. Suddenly, I needed to print additional copies.

In the period between the first and second edition, I realised that the first edition, written under the pressure of lockdown and a daily deadline, was missing two crucial lessons that actually underpin the other 22 lessons. I learned them when I was so young that I did not even consider them ‘lessons’. But the story behind them is so integral to my life that, without it, the book felt like it was missing something. This is the story that has framed my life, and which I included in the second edition.

* * *

The day I was born, it snowed in Johannesburg – a city better known for dust. The unusual weather marked the beginning of a decidedly unusual childhood. I grew up in a residential hotel, managed and run by my parents, located in the ‘poor white’ suburb of Langlaagte. In keeping with the laws of 1970s South Africa, the hotel had a space for every conceivable class and defined race. If you were white, could pay your way and needed a place to rest, you could rent a room at The Fountains. If you were Indian or Coloured (and male), you could drink in the ‘Indian Bar’, whose entrance was found on the side of the hotel, away from the white bars and lounges. Unfortunately, if you were black, you could only buy your liquor from the ‘non-white’ side of the bottle store. If you were then desperate to get drunk, you could hide behind the big fridge while furtively downing your drink. I think many people have forgotten (or don’t know) how crazy and cruel apartheid was.

As I describe in Lesson 16 (Be Kind), the hotel had a large backyard where the workers could relax, away from the pressures of their taskmasters in the front. I loved the yard and would spend my afternoons doing my homework there. One afternoon, I noticed Moses staring at me. Moses was known as a ‘scullery boy’. This meant that he washed the endless glasses that came from the bar. Moses was a quiet man, one of the younger of the ‘boys’. I imagine that at the time, Moses must have been in his early 20s. I started to notice how he often watched me as I did my homework. That day, Moses sat closer to me and seemed to be more interested in my books than usual. I asked him if he wanted to see my reader. He smiled at me.

I want to be a waiter, he said suddenly.

So ask my dad, I replied.

He looked down at the floor.

I can’t read, he said.

What do you mean, you can’t read? I asked.

I was eight years old and motoring my way through Enid Blyton books faster than my mother could buy them for me. I had never even considered the possibility of an adult not being able to read.

I left school when I was a small boy, Moses explained. My parents did not have money, and I had to work on my father’s farm.

I didn’t say anything. I looked around the yard at David, the waiter, Monica, my nanny, and the myriad other servants as they went about their duties. Was it possible that they, too, could not read? How can you live without being able to read? Suddenly, I looked down at my pencil, and it hit me that if they couldn’t read, maybe they could not write either!

I held out my pencil to Moses. I will teach you, I said, I will teach you to read and write.

And so, every day after school, I would take my books into the backyard and, having completed my homework, Moses and I would sit together as I taught this twenty-something-year-old Zulu man to read and write in English. Slowly, slowly, day by day, starting with what I had been taught in Grade 1, I showed Moses how to sound out the letters, how to put them together and then how to say them. I was playing school with a real person, and I loved every minute of it! Moses and I became quite a sight as we sat on beer crates, and he slowly, painstakingly, began to read. Moses was bright, and I was determined (or maybe, it was the other way round). Either way, it took us a year. When I finished Grade 3, Moses had sufficient ability in English to ask my dad if he could be a waiter. Not long after, Moses became a waiter. And I had become a teacher. For one glorious moment, in 1976, the world was a happy place. I offer the story of Moses by way of introduction because, without knowing it consciously at the time, I learned two lessons from Moses that actually underpin the other 22 lessons. The first lesson, almost a truism, is:

SUCCESS IS REALLY UP TO YOU!

This lesson is best expressed by Maria Robinson:

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.¹

Moses had almost zero chance of becoming a waiter when I first started teaching him. But he grabbed the opportunity of a willing child eager to help him with both hands. He did not stay a waiter for very long. Moses moved on to bigger and better things, eventually landing an office job and even getting a driver’s licence. I remember his pride, years later, when he arrived at the hotel in his company car. Moses taught me that, while how it starts is not up to us, what we make of our life is a result of our own conscious choices and actions.

This brings me to the second lesson, best expressed by a sentence I coined that I now use at the beginning of all my training sessions:

CHANGE IS A VERB!

So many of us are waiting for change, hoping that it will walk through the door one day. It doesn’t. In one of my favourite cartoons, a man stands in front of an audience and asks: Who wants change? Everyone puts up their hands. In the next strip, he asks a different question. No hand goes up. The question he asks is: "Who wants to change?"

The bottom line is this: If you want change, you have to start thinking differently and doing things differently. If something is not working for you, the only way for it to be different is to take charge of the change you want to bring about. As you will see in this book, our thoughts are incredibly important, but, ultimately, the universe supports action. Without a conscious effort to be different and to do things differently, nothing will change.

The lessons contained in this book are offered as handrails to guide you on the process. Let Moses be your inspiration. Against all odds, he succeeded by taking charge of his life. In a twist of fate, how it ended for Moses was not up to him either. He died in 1985, the year I finished school. While visiting his family in KwaZulu-Natal, he was killed in a turf war between the ANC and the IFP. Another sad casualty of apartheid. How Moses chose to spend the years in between was completely a function of his own actions. I trust yours will be too.

* * *

Each lesson contains my general explanation of it, as well as an entry written during the first 22 days of South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdown. As with any writing, time and subsequent events change the way we look at things. The lockdown pieces are essentially real-time diary entries, but they also show how the lessons may be applied practically to whatever you are experiencing in your life. The first lockdown was an uncertain time and we forget how little we knew about what life held in store for us. This is true of all life, always. But those three weeks were a pressure cooker of uncertainty and anxiety.

At numerous points throughout my posts, I was at pains to point out that Covid-19 and lockdown had different meanings for each