advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
Birthstone Meanings and How They Can Help Manifest Your Goals
Have you ever wondered why each birth month is connected to a particular gemstone ? It might seem strange at first, but there's a fascinating reason behind this unique association. Birthstones aren't just pretty stones but they hold ancient wisdom and energies that can guide you toward your goals.
By Vishal Batwara3 months ago in Journal
The Day The Bakkie Went Quiet On The Klip Road. AI-Generated.
The sound a bakkie makes when it gives up I have farmed the same three hundred hectares outside Reitz in the Free State for most of my life, and in all that time the one thing I have trusted more than the weather forecast is my bakkie. She is a 1994 Toyota Hilux, single cab, the colour of a dry mielie field, and she has never once let me down until the morning she did. I was fifty six years old that day and I felt every one of those years when the engine went.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Woman Who Never Wanted The Microphone. AI-Generated.
The morning it landed on my desk For fifteen years I was the person nobody could quite name at parties. I wrote the internal newsletters. I fixed the tone of the all-staff emails so they did not sound like a robot had drafted them. When someone got married or had a baby or lost a parent, I was the one who quietly organised the card and made sure everybody signed it. I liked being that person. I am forty two, and I have spent a good part of my adult life being reliable in a way that does not draw a crowd.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The House That Smelled of My Mother. AI-Generated.
The keys felt too small for what they opened When the attorney handed me the keys to my mother's house in a quiet street in Kempton Park, they sat in my palm like nothing. Three keys on a loop of green garden wire she had twisted herself, because she never trusted the plastic key rings from the hardware shop. I was thirty seven and I had never owned a house. I had rented flats since university, always someone else's walls, always a landlord to phone when the geyser burst. Now there was no one to phone. The house was mine, and so was everything that went wrong with it.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Book Club That Booked Appointments Instead. AI-Generated.
The loud one went quiet Our book club has met on the last Thursday of every month for eleven years. Five of us. We rotate houses across the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and whoever hosts is meant to have read the book, though at least two of us usually haven't and just nod along while eating the snacks. I am fifty-one, and I have been in this group since I was forty. We started because we wanted to read more and ended up with something closer to a family that happens to own a lot of paperbacks.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Room Where I Learned to Walk Again. AI-Generated.
The order I did not want I am fifty-four, and until this year I had never once thought about my own heartbeat. It just did its job in the background while I did mine. Then one grey afternoon in February my chest went tight in a way that frightened me, and a week later a doctor with kind, tired eyes sat across from me and said the sentence that changed the shape of my days. She said, walk every day. Not run, not lift, not anything dramatic. Just walk, thirty minutes, no excuses, rain or shine.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Air Here Holds On To You. AI-Generated.
The first thing I noticed was the wet I grew up believing air was something you did not feel. In Bloemfontein the air is a dry, thin thing that lifts the dust and cracks your knuckles by June. You put cream on your hands and it disappears in an hour. Your washing goes stiff on the line in twenty minutes. I lived inside that dryness for forty-three years without ever once thinking of it as a fact about my body.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Envelopes in the Blue Tin Trunk. AI-Generated.
The trunk under our bed My husband Piet died in the winter, and it took me until the following winter to open the trunk. It is a blue metal trunk, the kind we used to take on the train to Durban when the children were small, and it lived under our bed in the house in Bloemfontein for so many years that I had stopped seeing it. When you live with a thing long enough it becomes part of the wall. I only pulled it out because my hip had got so bad that I could no longer sleep on that side, and I wanted the extra floor space to keep a cushion where I could lower myself down in the mornings.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
We Married Late and Went Looking for Quiet. AI-Generated.
The register office and the choir I am fifty-six, and until two years ago I did not think I would sign my name next to anyone else's again. My first husband died when I was fifty-one, and for a long stretch I moved through the house as if I were dusting around a person who had stepped out. Then I went back to the community choir on a Tuesday night because a friend more or less pushed me through the door, and there was Gordon, second row of the basses, holding his folder too high and singing slightly flat and utterly unbothered about it. His wife had been gone four years by then. We did not fall into anything. We stood next to the tea urn at the interval for about eight weeks before he asked if I would like to have soup somewhere that was not a church hall.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Two Hundred Plates. AI-Generated.
The call that changed my kitchen I was elbow deep in a sink of soaking pots when my phone lit up on the counter, dancing in a little puddle of dishwater. I nearly did not answer. I am a woman who runs her catering from a converted garage in Kempton Park, and by four in the afternoon I am usually too tired to talk to anyone who is not a supplier or my own mother. But something made me dry my hands on my apron and pick up.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Small Bare Place Behind My Ear. AI-Generated.
The morning the blow-dryer found it I was getting ready for work in our flat in Melville, the one with the wonky geyser and the jacaranda that drops purple all over the balcony in October. It was a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesdays I go into the office early to beat the M1 traffic, and I was rushing, blow-drying my hair upside down the way I have done since I was fifteen. My mother taught me that trick. Flip your head over, aim the warm air at the roots, and you get volume without any fuss.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
