“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Life comes with it’s fair share experiences and for each of these we are either actively involved or passively engaged. Some of these experiences will not be the best but that doesn’t mean it’s the standard and as such you can have better more fulfilling and worthwhile experiences. At times it might never feel like it which may make you have doubt in humanity. I think and believe that before you do, reflect on the fact that you are human and what makes us human is our humanity. Any other thing is secondary to the fact of our humanity.
Yesterday I had this meeting scheduled with a designer who is currently revamping our website at Ryculture Health and Social Innovation. I don’t like getting late to my engagements and it unnerves me when I happen to be the one holding others up. On this occasion it did happen because KeNHA and their people decided to effect road repairs during the day on the highway then having presumed a swift ride I also failed to give myself an allowance. If you’ve been reading through the blog you can already assume I am storyteller by default, this I take from my maternal grandmother I presume. In meetings as usual we start with pleasantries of getting to know how life is faring for the other party, it’s part of being African or so I think. For a meeting that took two and a half hours, the technical work was covered in 30mins and we were both satisfied. So what took the other time?
As I earlier alluded to at the start, it’s important to have some faith in humanity. Having some level of confidence that we are all good and at least when you do doubt, then be the hope in such a situation. You can be the difference. Naturally, I prefer and love working with people I can trust. In this case being it was my website being developed there are key features that need to be integrated and therefore any flaws has the potential to negatively impact our operations in the next phase. From our discussions, I could tell that I got a good dealer to service our needs especially at a time when trusting others with your money without knowing them isn’t easy unless it’s a trusted brand. This was the first time we were meeting. Being in the IT space and a businessman at that, most likely he wouldn’t focus much on understanding our mission as a company. To the contrary he was keen on the details and super insightful on how better to optimize certain functionalities for seamless operations. I felt delighted to be working with such a person.
Here is the contradiction and the reason I think we need to hope for better though. On a similar project except this is for another organization, I at a developers mercy because he is the kind of person to respond to your emails when it serves him right i.e. there is a cost to be pushed your way. This has been the experience since March and as you can tell, it’s COVID era where remote work is the mainstay and online presence a critical requirement. I feel worried and concerned that we might have more of such but having others who commit to their vocation like Dennis of Nelium Systems who are working on our revamped website, I wouldn’t be more hopeful.
At the end of our meeting and closing with the key action items moving forward there was one thing that stayed with me: money is good and we all need it. However for each and every experience money grants us an opportunity to enjoy, the memories and feelings associated are as a result of the people we experience them with. Why not factor that (the humanity) in our interactions?
“Being human is the fabric to our humanity. Let’s wear it with honor and dignity.”