Living your dream wedding. Being a father for the first time. Experiencing your daughter’s seemingly limitless talent at the school play. Running a mother over after drinking heavily and insisting on driving home when you didn’t have to. Being wrongly convicted for murder. Watching the funeral of your personal icon or someone who was dear to you. Loosing a wife to a chronic disease or a parent to old age. Your life could change in a heart beat. A single event, over just a few seconds could change everything.

In one way or another we will all go through such a life defining moment in our lives. As the bible says, we all have our own yolks to carry. But sometimes we burden ourselves unnecessarily by being selfish, greedy, thoughtless…. Yet it is almost always less about how we get into dire circumstances as it is about how we handle these situations and what type of people we become after that. Sometimes the pain we endure insures the growth that needs to happen in the future.

Mandela went to prison for 27 years for the sweet crime of fighting for human rights. After what we can only imagine was a hard almost three decades in jail, he came out ready to forgive. Whether it was vision or out of pure necessity, he did what he did and it has defined him. He’s celebrated because so many of us experience similar things and allow anger, hate, jealousy or whatever it might be clouding our judgements to overcome us.

Writer: Katlego Modipane