Dealing with the flags of life

Each year we are faced with the pressure of magically turning into a better version of ourselves when the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the year.

Stop smoking, lose weight, be successful, save money, stop drinking, get fit… they say change is as good as a holiday.

Who in their right mind signed up for a park run, woke up the following morning and broke up with their partner, only to run 5km all in a day?

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A few years ago, I interviewed one of South Africa’s most famous murderers who explained to me in detail how it felt to kill someone.

He said taking someone’s life was like rewriting every red flag in your mind and morals.

The murderer described to me how the victims he strangled turned into doll figures in his arms and how their facial expressions turned from frightened to nothing.

“Stop what you are doing, look at the man, he is dying, but you have to push past the red flag, the red alarm,” he said.

I have never forgotten the murderer’s detailed explanation and never stopped thinking about the red flags and what they meant.

Later, I realised it was just as hard to plant a green flag as it was to surpass the red flags. Sometimes it was harder to do the right thing than fall into the wrong thing.

A break-up was unlike any other loss because the person you lost was not dead, but alive and well.

It was easier to accept the loss of someone when they were no longer walking the earth but are supposedly in a “better place”.

People deal with loss in different ways and find the means to survive the sudden feeling of loss or change.

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Some people experienced the roller-coaster known as the seven steps of grief, while others overindulged in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

For once, being an overthinker was beneficial because I could overanalyse the situation and deal with it accordingly.

For some reason, I processed this self-inflicted change as a symptom of being so-called lovesick by treating each emotion as a symptom of the flu.

When you catch the flu, you usually had symptoms like an itchy throat, blocked nose, headache and fever. It is the same for grieving, but the symptoms appeared in random order: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Victimologist Prof Jaco Barkhuizen once said labelling or naming the feeling identifies the emotion that helps you to process it and move on.

This concept helped me to move on and plant the green flags of recovering from illness.

One of the green flags was doing something I had never done before: I signed up for the local park run.

It was admittedly harder than I anticipated, considering it had its own challenges; blood from branch scratches along the route, sweat running down your face and tears of joy when you finally reached the finish line.

The person who said you couldn’t run from your problems has not completed a park run, I now know.

Besides the satisfaction of challenging yourself, nothing beat the feeling of completing an uphill jog or battle before breakfast.

Here’s to the first 10km for the year – and counting…

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