Passion and Purpose Ruth First and Nelson Mandela's Silent Bond
What does the life of Ruth First teach us? It teaches us the path to inner peace and quietness. If you desire peace of mind set values of what life means to you and live those values totally. Get consumed by a powerful moral idea. If you are genuinely living what life means to you the consequence is peace of mind! Only the honest know peace; the insincere and the cowards do not live in peace. Reality is love; to live in love is to work for the good of all human beings.
Live in love for all human beings and know peace of mind and body. Since the dawn of the 20th century until now we have seen a new breed of apostles of peace; the psychotherapists. One of those psychotherapists was Victor Frankl. 8 Victor Frankl tells us that we are always searching for meaning in our lives and that if we do not find meaning we live nihilistic existence.
A nihilistic existence is the concept where you fail to live a life beyond yourself. That is the reason most people are not happy despite living lives of super luxury and wealth that is unknown in history. Our world is a basket case of sadness and glum: stress and depression is our daily existence. If you do not know where you want to go, you will go to nowhere. We have visionary leaders who set out the path for others to walk in. What is life without visions of where we want to go? Ruth First was known for her simplicity, her strength of character, her naturalness, her audacity for hope and her comradely attitude; a person of profound ideas. It is not easy to find a person with all the virtues that were combined in Ruth. It is not easy for a person to develop a character like hers. She was deeply woman – a fully grounded woman. As a young woman, she was very stylish, beautiful and full of life. As an adult she retained her beauty as she grappling with the most difficult very hard questions of the world. She lived a full life and a life of purpose. A butterfly she was!
She was strikingly beautiful and attractive. As she grew up some would have considered the world of show business as her destiny. And the manner in which she carried her school work with fortitude, some would have said she should spent her life life of academia. Definitely she could have excelled in the world of academia. She could have easily become one of the greatest leading dynamos of education. Ruth First lived her life as a total person. Her life embodied every aspect of human existence. At the pinnacle of her life was a burning passion for bettering the world. She was a social worker, journalist, librarian, revolutionary leader, freedom fighter, a champion of workers, teacher/lecturer and a beautiful woman. She had a feminine tough all the way through. She blended all her strength and upbringing to become who she was. She had a vision of love. True Civilization is love. That kind of civilization requires people to sacrifice for the collective and not just live for the individual alone. Whereas we do not know what the ultimate reality is, reality lies in accepting that at the spiritual level, we are joined to one another. 10 She was a philosopher too. She believed in a natural society that has diverse colours. A multi-coloured rose garden is more beautiful than a rose garden with only one colour. Nature is wise in making people come in different colours and shapes.
Love is joining, connecting and fellowship. Racism and tribalism disconnect us to one another hence making us feel unloved, and lacking in peace and joy. Born into privilege on a legendary scale, Ruth First sacrificed his worldly possessions in the fight to secure a safe space for the beleaguered African people (the materially wretched poverty stricken people) during the height of apartheid in South Africa. She had an ability to speak a language that resonated with the downtrodden, a deep historical shrewdness, and that incomparable sense of drama – these endowments defined her titanic personality.
