I won’t lie, this month came out of nowhere and caught the team and I slap bang in the middle of end-of-year and Covid fatigue. South Africa has been at Level 1 for a little over a month now and everything is almost at full capacity again.
But the lockdown lull is difficult to shake off and because we have spent the better part of the year taking it easy, deciding not to push through the last couple of months to try and salvage what's left of 2020 feels like we're being lazy, unproductive and wasteful.
This time last year I came across Binwe Adebayo’s article, Let’s be mediocre: A letter to over-achievers. In it she talks about her competitive childhood and how forming her identity around productivity and achievement ultimately led to some intense mental and physical afflictions, including her hair falling out!
“Again, I say, let us please achieve some mediocrity. Because this tail-chasing, top of the pops hamster wheel of life is not high performance and it’s not an achievement. It’s the desperate hoarding of external validity at the cost of our true purposes — which go far beyond a test score or fancy title”, she aptly advises.
The pandemic isn’t over just because we’re seemingly over it. This month we're saying rest, baf’wethu.
By Pink Plume
Binwe’s article can be found here: https://medium.com/@BinweA/lets-be-mediocre-a-letter-to-over-achievers-de92fac7fdf2