Fortune

When I was 8 years old, I got home one Sunday from church, excited to be back home to debrief with my grandmother what I had experienced that day. I had met a distant cousin of mine who had shared so captivatingly about her experience at ballet. I was reminded that my mother had always been talking about her own aspirations to take me to ballet, but we did not have the means. So, on that day I got home and asked my grandmother why this ballet had never happened; sitting on her orange couch which we had ever since I could remember, she pulled out her hand and said “Fochi, (an endearing name she has for me, short for Fortune), look at my hand,” so I looked at the hand and she said “what do you see?” In the wisdom of an 8 year old, I said your hand, a response which she was not expecting or envisioned as it did not serve the lesson she was about to deliver...

With a blend of disguised slight irritation and disappointment at the answer but with the determination to land the lesson she continued and said “ “my hand is the representation of the state of the world, 

….in this world, there’ll be always someone who will have more means than you, who will be better at something than you, who will be smarter than you, who will be more beautiful, there’ll always be more this and that, BUT that doesn’t mean that you are not enough, in the same way that these uneven fingers cohabitate harmoniously on my hand, so should you engage with the world, in a way that says you are enough”. Because none of these fingers ever tries to be the other and yet they so beautifully deliver on their purpose in their unevenness because each is designed to serve a particular purpose and they stick to that purpose and ensure the hand is able to function, and so should you proudly own your purpose even if the manifestation doesn’t look like what the world wants to see. #YouArePartofSomethingBigger 

Only later in life did I realise the wisdom of those words when I was now holding space for others in facilitation and coaching, where it had become clear that in this world we subconsciously believe we  exist to outshine and outdo each other, a bit like the hunger games for existence. This I feel is not actually intentional but has been conditioned. Whether it’s a job, a promotion, an opportunity, getting into university, getting into school, beauty pageants, anything,  it is about the exacerbation of the “not enough” of those who don’t make it. So as a result I have seen how we can get debilitated by those moments when we don’t make it into something or make the cut, and it starts to create a narrative, a narrative of inadequacy. 

With this in mind, I started the Journey2Enough movement to create a space where people can share stories that mirror everyday experiences that facilitate reflection, self acceptance and self celebration. The intention is to create a meaningful inspiration bank from all walks of life. This way we can expand our self empowering tools and avail them to our community. At the core of all this, is the belief that YOU ARE ENOUGH, I AM ENOUGH, so let us journey together to the full embodiment of this belief.

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