Letting the sky into your heart

It’s Christmas and I’m tired of politics, I want to inject some meaning into my life.

It’s fashionable to scoff at Christmas but I’m impressed by the way Muslims respect Ramadan, Jews observe Hanukah and the Passover, and Hindus celebrate Diwali and Holi, because these special times are designed to make us pull back and reflect, renew our commitment to those we love most, add a little balance to our work-obsessed lives and give time off to our tired bodies.

Last Christmas, my home was filled with family and an exuberant Irish lover who arrived with baggage 52kg overweight with Christmas presents — he even had a beard and a sharp sense of humour. He played the Messiah loud, quoted Yeats and made a mean wasabi mash, an incredible prawn dish and fantastic eggs ranchero for breakfast. That great romance fell apart when I wouldn’t marry him; what can I say, blondes don’t always have brains.

Through my travels with him I met another Irish couple; a management trainer who is a brilliant photographer, a skill he took up in his early 50s and now is a major exhibitor, and his fantastic wife, an interior designer. We’ve been exchanging warm emails in this period.

Encouraged by the Irishman, I went on a fiction-writing course in England — the best thing I did all year — and met a fantastic bunch of people. We communicate weekly, if not daily, and I’m saving up to join them next year again for another week of writing and laughing and cooking together and renewing meaningful friendships.

This Christmas, I’m alone at home. It’s been a hectic year of travel and work. I’m working on a book and need creative time. I’m cooking a three-course dinner for 10 friends on Christmas Eve and will offer help at the Central Methodist church in Johannesburg where refugees clog every pew, every passage and every spare bit of ground at night when they come seeking food and a safe place to sleep. It is the most tragic, desperate scene.

These are the lost, abandoned and frightened people of Africa; they have come here, to the most stable, wealthy country on the continent, seeking some safety and hopes of opportunity. For most of the time, South Africans — who relied on the countries these people came from to protect our liberation-struggle cadres — treat them with contempt. No wonder some turn to crime. What else can they do? We provide no shelter, we fail to register refugees and we don’t provide enough work for our own, never mind them.

At a river clean-up in Cape Town recently, the largest group of people to arrive to help clean the stinking, badly polluted Black River, and those who worked hardest, was a group of about 10 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Zimbabwe. They are all homeless and without work, but, they said, they wanted to show South Africans that they could be part of this country, that they could contribute.

Ireland’s economy has grown rapidly in the past 20 years. It has gone from being an indebted nation to the second-wealthiest nation in the world. The growth has been on the back of sound economic planning and welcoming foreigners, the talented and those who will do the menial jobs the Irish won’t.

Christmas has meaning if we deliberately sit and reflect on our privileges. Each person reading this is among an elite. Just the fact of computer access and knowing your way around the internet already displays that.

You don’t have to be a Christian to use this time wisely — as a time of gratitude, attention to values and generosity toward others.

One of the people I most enjoyed meeting this year was a very old man who wore dark glasses. He’d lived in Latin America and so have I. He spoke in the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes. He said: “I wear dark glasses because it brings the clouds and the sky into my heart; maybe I lived on a cloud in a previous life.” What a great lesson for life, to look past the clouds and let the sky enter your heart.

Then he said in Spanish: “If the heavens open, an angel will fall out.”

Perhaps if you allow the sky into your heart, angels come too.

I hope there is sunshine in your heart today and that you extend it to all you meet, especially those you love best. Give special consideration to the lonely. And when the assembled family drives you mad in the days ahead, remember this: it’s not always important to be right. It doesn’t matter if the house is untidy. If the turkey burns, then know that it is healthier to eat salad. It simply doesn’t matter. What is important is to be with those you love now and to let them know how much you care. And to get lots of sleep.