Where can I listen to this podcast?

This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.

Does this podcast accept guests?

No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

Just Reflections Podcast

Claim This Podcast

by Impactful ideas that challenge my thinking. I hope they'll challenge yours too.

32 episodes

Updated Daily

Accepts GuestsHas SponsorsLocation 🇬🇧

Podcast Overview

Impactful ideas that challenge my thinking. I hope they'll challenge yours too. <a href="https://justreflections.bhekani.com?utm_medium=podcast">justreflections.bhekani.com</a>

Language

🇺🇲

Publishing Since

6/13/2022

Visit Website View on Apple Podcasts RSS Feed

1 verified contact email on file for Just Reflections Podcast

Pitch yourself as a guest, propose sponsorships, or reach out directly to the host.

See contact details

Recent Episodes

March 14, 2026

Nobody wants to be the villager

Today, on the way to church, I saw two men walking on the side of the road.They weren’t rushing. They didn’t look like they were heading somewhere urgent. They were just walking together, slowly, like they were taking a stroll.It hit me harder than I expected.It was just two men walking. But the image felt strangely rare, almost foreign. And as I watched them I found myself asking: when was the last time I had taken a walk with a friend? Not to go to the shops. Not as part of exercise. Not on the way to some other thing. Just a walk. Just time together. Just movement and conversation without an agenda.I couldn’t remember.I’ve been sitting with that all day. Because it put words to a feeling I’ve been carrying for a while, one I didn’t quite know how to name until I saw those two men doing something so ordinary that it looked almost strange.Every week, I meet my friends at church, people I genuinely love. But often, when we see each other, there’s this awkwardness at the start. It feels like we have to do a full life update before we can settle into each other’s company. Summarize the week. Sometimes the last two weeks. Work, family, stress, random developments, whatever happened since we last saw each other. And there’s this subtle distance underneath it all, because where do you even start?I don’t think that awkwardness comes from a lack of love. I think it comes from a lack of overlap.We still care about each other, but we’re no longer inside enough of each other’s ordinary lives. We know the headlines, but not the texture. We know what happened, but we weren’t there when it happened. So every reunion begins with reporting.And I think I know why.Everyone wants the village, but no one wants to be the villager.The village is built out of small inconveniencesThink about something as simple as moving house.You can hire a moving company. They arrive, they carry the boxes, they do the work, and that’s that. The problem is solved. Everyone moves on.Or you can ask your friends to help.If you ask your friends, you’re inconveniencing them. They have to block out a day. They have to reorder their plans around your need. They have to lift your stuff and drive home tired and dusty, feeling like they spent their Sunday afternoon in somebody else’s problem.And yet, something richer has happened. You’ve shared an experience. There’s conversation between the boxes. There are jokes. There’s frustration. There’s pizza at the end. There’s the feeling, however ordinary, that your life touched theirs and theirs touched yours. The move is no longer just an event that happened to you. It becomes part of the story your friendship carries.The same thing is true of something as small as a lift from the airport. I can order an Uber. It’s easy. I don’t need to ask anyone. I don’t need to impose. I don’t need to make myself someone else’s responsibility. But if a friend picks me up, there’s the catch-up in the car, the small ritual of arrival. I re-enter home not through a transaction but through a relationship.The modern world is very good at helping us complete tasks without needing each other. That’s often a good thing. But when it becomes the default shape of life, we solve the practical problem and eliminate the relational opportunity in the same stroke. The inconvenience wasn’t a bug. It was the mechanism.We’ve confused updates with overlapA lot of what we call friendship now is really the exchange of updates rather than the sharing of life.There’s a difference between knowing what happened to your friend and having some firsthand connection to the thing that happened.There’s a difference between hearing that someone had a stressful week and having been one of the people who helped carry some part of that week.There’s a difference between hearing about someone’s child’s football match and having stood on the sidelines with them, even though you don’t care about football.There’s a difference between hearing that someone moved house and having been one of the people sweating through the move with them.There’s a difference between hearing that someone got back from a trip and having been the one who picked them up from the airport.The more life is lived in private lanes, self-managed and app-mediated, the more our relationships are forced to survive on narration. We tell each other what happened after the fact. We perform catch-up.That’s better than nothing. But it’s not the same thing as overlap. And without overlap, relationships begin to feel strangely thin even when the affection is still real.I think that’s the feeling I’ve been sensing at church. It’s not that my friends and I have stopped loving each other. It’s that too much of our lives now happens offstage from one another. So when we meet, we’re left trying to compress days of living into a few minutes of reporting. We’re trying to recreate in speech what might have been built through shared presence.It’s very hard to feel deeply connected to people whose lives you only access through summaries.Friendship needs time that has no purposeThat image of the two men walking stayed with me because it pointed to another part of the problem.Those men weren’t solving anything. They weren’t doing a favour. They weren’t completing an errand. They were just together.That looked rare to me because it has become rare.We live in a world that trains us to justify our time constantly. Even our friendships become structured around events. We meet for church, for dinner, for coffee because we haven’t seen each other in a while. Always around a reason. Around an occasion.But when do we just walk?When do we sit around long enough for conversation to unfold without a plan?A lot of real closeness is built in exactly the kind of time that looks wasteful to the productive mind. Slow time. Meandering time. Time with enough slack for random thoughts, dumb jokes, silences, little detours, memories that surface unexpectedly. The kind of time that doesn’t produce an obvious output but leaves you feeling like you actually know someone.Friendship grows in the walk that had no destination. In the extra hour after the thing. In hanging around and tagging along. In being near each other without needing a reason impressive enough to justify the time.We say we want connection, but we increasingly reserve our lives for efficiency. We still make time for each other, but often only in formats too tight, too structured, or too occasional to hold the weight of actual friendship.So when we meet, we’re left asking, “Where do we even start?”Prosperity makes this worseAnd here’s the uncomfortable part: a lot of us are choosing this. I’m choosing this. Not consciously, not maliciously, but structurally.As your means increase, your ability to avoid needing people increases with it. You can pay for delivery. You can hire help. You can solve privately what previous generations solved communally.On one level, that’s a gift.But one of the hidden temptations of having more means is that you can begin to structure your life so that you never need anyone. That looks like freedom. It looks like adulthood done properly.If you’re not careful, it also hollows out the ordinary give-and-take from which community is built.Our parents often relied on other people because they had to. Not because they were more enlightened. But because life forced a level of human entanglement that many of us can now pay to avoid. If you didn’t have the money, the services, the spare capacity, then you asked someone. You borrowed something. You made do through human beings.Now many of us have enough means to opt out of all of that. And that’s the danger. The better off you are, the easier it becomes to build a life where no ordinary person ever has any real claim on your time. No one needs to be asked. No one needs to be leaned on. And if nobody is ever leaned on, nobody is ever bound.What earlier generations practiced by constraint, we may now have to practice by conviction. Not because independence is wrong, but because unchecked independence has a way of quietly becoming isolation.The moral vocabulary of avoidanceThere’s another layer to this that I find hard to ignore, partly because I’ve felt its pull myself.We live in a moment saturated with a certain kind of therapeutic language. Protect your peace. Set boundaries. You don’t owe anyone anything. Cut people off. Prioritize yourself. Do what’s best for you.Some of these ideas, in the right setting, are real and important. But once they get flattened into internet slogans, they start doing something else entirely. They become a moral vocabulary for avoiding ordinary human obligation. And the scary part is how reasonable it sounds. Who would argue against protecting your peace?Every inconvenience begins to feel suspect. Every request starts sounding like a threat to your peace. Every uncomfortable act of care begins to look like poor boundaries.What gets lost is a simple truth: a meaningful human life involves being claimed by people. It involves caring about things that wouldn’t matter to you except that they matter to someone you love.There’s a difference between being harmed by others and being needed by others. There’s a difference between exploitation and obligation. A healthy life has to know that difference, because once you collapse those categories, every form of community starts to feel dangerous. And once community feels dangerous, the village is finished.What being a villager actually looks likeTo be a villager is to care about what matters to your people.It’s going to your friend’s child’s football match even though you don’t care about football. It’s helping carry things you didn’t ask to carry. It’s showing up at an inconvenient time. It’s taking a call when you were planning to rest. It’s being brought into someone else’s world and treating that not as an interruption from real life but as part of real life.This is how community is actually built. Not in grand gestures, but in many small acts of presence over time. You make the airport run. You help with the move. You sit in the waiting room. And then, almost without noticing, your lives become intertwined. People stop being adjacent to your story and start appearing inside it.You can no longer think about being pregnant with your first child without remembering that Dombolo threw a celebration for you. You can’t think about your 40th birthday without also thinking about the surprise party Dombolo organised that you didn’t attend. You can’t think about the time you lost your baby without remembering Nigel picking you up to take you to the airport at 7am on a winter morning. Your experiences are no longer just yours. You’ve lived life together.That’s shared memory. It’s the reason you don’t have to do the full catch-up every time you see each other. Your friend was already there for parts of the story.There’s a kind of adult life many of us are quietly building. I recognize it because I see it in my own. A life of smooth functioning. Bills paid. Calendar controlled. Problems resolved with minimal disruption. Nothing too dependent. Nothing too needy.It sounds responsible. It sounds mature.But it can also become a sealed life. A life where nobody can really enter unless invited in advance. Where needs are outsourced before they can become shared. Where convenience has protected us not only from hassle but from belonging.A villager isn’t simply someone who likes people. A villager is someone whose life can be entered.Take the walkI keep coming back to those two men on the side of the road.What struck me wasn’t just that they were together. It was that they were unhurried. Their time seemed open. Their presence with each other didn’t appear to need justification. They weren’t achieving anything. They were just sharing time.And that image felt like a small rebuke to the way I’ve been living.We’ve learned to value convenience so highly that we often don’t notice what it’s costing us. We protect our time so carefully that we don’t always realize we’re also protecting ourselves from one another. We avoid burdening people, and in doing so we sometimes avoid belonging to them.But some of what looks inefficient is where life actually happens. And some of what seems like a burden is just what love looks like in ordinary clothes.The window for many of these ordinary acts of presence is shorter than we like to think. You don’t get infinite chances to take the walk, make the trip, show up at the thing. Some of the people whose lives you could be sharing right now won’t always be this available.Maybe the reason so many of us feel this low-grade distance from people we genuinely love isn’t that affection has disappeared. Maybe it’s that our lives are no longer arranged in ways that generate enough shared experience. Maybe the reason catch-ups feel so heavy is that they’re doing too much work. Maybe we’ve become too good at avoiding one another’s burdens.We’re friends. We care. We mean it. But we’ve lost many of the little practices through which friendship becomes thick and natural. So we stand there doing updates. Trying to bridge with words what should have been built with life.Everyone wants the village.I’m starting to think the real question isn’t whether we want one. It’s whether we’re willing to live in a way that makes one. To ask for the lift instead of the Uber. To take the walk. To leave room in our lives for demands we didn’t schedule.For my part, I think I need to take more walks. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://justreflections.bhekani.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">justreflections.bhekani.com</a>

November 17, 2025

She's been nothing but needy. And that's taught me a lot about love

I thought I understood love before I became a father.I’d loved deeply; my wife, my friends, my siblings, my parents. I’d read about it, prayed about it, written about it. Love was something I knew well, or so I believed. But there are levels to understanding something as complex as love. And my understanding before had missing elements.The love I have for my wife began the way most romantic love does: with choice. I noticed her; the way she laughed, the sharpness of her mind, how she moved through the world with this quiet confidence that I found magnetic. She had qualities I admired, values that aligned with mine, a way of seeing things that made me want to build a life alongside her. I chose her. And in choosing her, I was also choosing myself. Choosing the kind of life I wanted, the kind of person I wanted to become.There’s nothing cynical about that. I think that’s how most of us love. We meet someone, and something in them calls to something in us. They fit. They make sense. They have to, in some way, earn our affection. Not through performance exactly, but by being the kind of person who draws love out of us. That’s natural. It’s healthy, even.Over time, of course, that love deepens. It becomes less about the qualities that first attracted you and more about the person themselves, flaws and all. The conditions soften. The love becomes unconditional, or at least it moves in that direction. You forgive things you wouldn’t have tolerated at the beginning. You stay through hard seasons. You learn that real love isn’t just attraction; it’s commitment to someone even when they’re not at their best.I thought that was the highest expression of love I’d ever experience. Two people who chose to reveal their most vulnerable parts to each other and do life with each other, no matter what.Then, my daughter was born.The first time I held her, this two-kilogram, wrinkled creature with eyes that couldn’t quite focus yet and limbs that wriggled aimlessly, I felt something crack open in my heart. It wasn’t gentle. It was overwhelming, almost violent in its intensity. Here was this tiny person who couldn’t do anything for me. She couldn’t charm me. She couldn’t impress me. She couldn’t even look at me and smile.In those first weeks, she cried. My God, did she cry! The kind of crying where she’s absolutely inconsolable as if she’s in heart-wrenching pain, that makes you question everything about your competence as a parent. She kept us up through nights that felt endless, where I’d pace the passageway with her on my shoulder, her small body rigid with whatever discomfort she couldn’t articulate, and I’d feel this bone-deep exhaustion settling into me.If you’re a parent, you know this peculiar chemistry, where exhaustion and frustration somehow transform into fiercer devotion. Where the very thing that’s breaking you is also remaking you. Where you discover reserves of patience you didn’t know existed, even as you’re running on empty.If I’d applied the same criteria to her that I’d applied to my wife, if I’d evaluated her based on the qualities she brought to my life, I wouldn’t have loved her. She gave us nothing but need. She disrupted everything. She made our lives objectively harder. Especially my wife’s life; she took all the time and attention and energy and affection of the woman I love the most in the whole world.And yet.She drew love out of me with a fierceness that kept growing.Not because of who she was, she wasn’t anyone yet, really. But simply because she was. Because she was mine. Because when I looked at her sleeping in my arms, her tiny fist curled around my finger, something in me recognised something in her. This wasn’t love I’d chosen. This wasn’t love I’d earned or that she’d earned from me. This was love that just... existed. Fully formed. Unconditional from the very first breath.That’s when I realised: I’d been thinking about love all wrong. Or at least my picture was incomplete.Suddenly, all the theology I’d preached for years about grace didn’t feel theoretical anymore.I’d always known, intellectually, about unconditional love. I’m a Christian. I’ve preached about grace, about how God loves us not because of what we do but because of who He is. I could quote the verses, explain the theology. I understood the concept.But understanding and experiencing are two different things.Before my daughter, I had no framework for practicing that kind of love. Every love I’d experienced before had an element of reciprocity built into it. My friends chose to be my friends. My wife chose me. Even my relationship with God, as one-sided as His love is, involved my response, my faith, my actions.But my daughter? She didn’t choose me. She couldn’t respond. She couldn’t reciprocate. And yet I would have, and still would, do anything for her. I’d sacrifice sleep, money, comfort, my own needs. I’d put myself between her and any harm without thinking twice. Not because she earned it, but because loving her is woven into the fabric of who I am now.Parenting didn’t teach me a new concept. It thrust me into a new position. For the first time in my life, I was in God’s shoes, or the closest a human can get. I was the one loving first. The one loving despite. The one loving toward a vision of who this person could become, even though right now she’s just beginning to exist in the world.But this revelation didn’t settle things. It unsettled them.If this was what love really was, this unconditional, unearned, fierce devotion, then are all the other loves lesser or incomplete or practice runs?Here’s what I think: parental love isn’t just unconditional. It’s transformational.When I hold my daughter, I don’t just accept her as she is, though I do, completely. I also see who she could be. I have this vision of her: full of potential, full of possibility. I see the woman she might become: confident, kind, capable of deep thought and deep love. And every decision I make now, every way I interact with her, is aimed at helping her become that person.If you’re a parent you’ve probably felt this, looking at your child and experiencing time collapse. Seeing simultaneously who they are and who they’re becoming. Feeling the sacred weight of being the bridge between those two realities. Feeling like you’re holding potential itself in your arms.But it’s also terrifying. What if I get this wrong?This transformational quality of love is about having hopes for your child, sure, but it’s also about being an active participant in their becoming. Every interaction is formative. When I soothe her cries, I’m teaching her the world is safe. When I delight in her babbling, I’m teaching her that her voice matters. When I maintain consistency even when I’m exhausted, I’m building her capacity to trust.And it’s not just my individual interactions with her. She’s watching everything. The way my wife and I speak to each other. How we handle disagreement. Whether we show contempt or compassion when we’re frustrated. Whether we stonewall or stay engaged when things get hard. Every pattern she observes is writing code in her developing mind about what love looks like.If we model anxious attachment, she’ll learn that love is uncertain. If we can’t handle conflict well, she’ll learn that disagreement means disconnection. If we show each other contempt, she’ll learn that love includes cruelty.The weight of this hit me one night when my wife and I were having a tense conversation, and I saw my daughter watching us intently. She couldn’t understand our words, but it really seemed like she could feel the energy. And that made it real to me that we’re not just living our marriage. We’re teaching her what marriage is.So in these ways, love is a creative force. Not creating from nothing, as God does, but partnering with Him in the sacred work of shaping a life. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.With my wife, I can hope for who she might become, but my influence on that is limited. She’s an adult making her own choices. But my daughter’s completely impressionable. Frighteningly so. My wife and I are her world right now. Individual moments might not matter much. But the cumulative pattern of how we love her will shape who she becomes.I think about it like erosion. Each individual abrasion is subtle, almost imperceptible. But over time, it shapes the landscape. Except we’re not just wearing away at something. We’re also building. Every loving interaction deposits something: security, worth, capability. It’s erosion and accretion happening simultaneously. We’re both carving channels and laying down sediment that will become the bedrock of who she becomes.So transformational love operates on two levels simultaneously. First, it accepts completely: ‘You are enough, right now, exactly as you are.’ Then it calls forward: ‘And I see who you could be, and I’m here to help you get there.’This isn’t conditional love masquerading as unconditional. The acceptance is real and complete. But real love doesn’t leave us where we are. It sees our potential and labours toward it. Unconditional doesn’t mean static. It means ‘I love you at every stage of your becoming.’That’s what real love does. It accepts first. Then it transforms.I couldn’t help but wonder: if love shapes us this profoundly, if every interaction is writing code in my daughter’s developing mind, then how was I shaped? What loves formed me? What code was written into my own understanding?Looking back, I can see a pattern. Each form of love I’ve experienced hasn’t been random. They’ve been sequential, building on each other. Each one teaching me something I needed to know for the next.When you’re a child, you receive love before you can do anything to deserve it. Your parents love you simply because you exist. You learn that you are inherently valuable, not because of what you accomplish or how you perform, but because you are theirs. That’s your first lesson: you are worthy simply by being.That’s what I was giving my daughter now. She was receiving what I had received. The circle was completing itself.Then you grow up alongside siblings. Sibling love is strange. You don’t choose your siblings. They’re just there. Sometimes they annoy you. Sometimes they’re nothing like you. But you love them anyway. You learn to coexist with people you didn’t select, to practice patience and loyalty even when resonance isn’t automatic. That’s the second lesson: love can endure even when it’s not chosen.Then comes friendship, the first time you really get to choose. You meet someone and think, “Yes, this person. I want to walk through life alongside them.” There’s freedom in that. You’re choosing based on shared values, shared interests, shared routines. That’s the third lesson: love flourishes in choice.But then romantic love enters, and the stakes change entirely. You’re choosing someone you’re going to let into the most private, most vulnerable parts of your life. You’re handing someone the power to truly hurt you, trusting they won’t use that power against you. It’s love with skin in the game. You’re saying, “Here’s my whole self: the good, the bad, the broken. And I’m trusting you with it.” That’s the fourth lesson: real love involves risk.And then you become a parent. And suddenly, you’re on the other side of the equation entirely. You’re no longer just receiving love or choosing to give it. You’re creating it from nothing. You’re loving someone who didn’t earn it, who can’t reciprocate it, who doesn’t even understand it yet. You’re pouring yourself out into this small person who gives you nothing back except need.And you do it gladly. Sacrificially. With a kind of devotion that surprises even you.To love someone who hasn’t done anything to deserve it. To see who they could be and love them fiercely even though they’re nowhere near that yet.And this wasn’t just my journey. This is THE journey. The universal pattern. Every human being, ideally, goes through this same curriculum. We all learn love in stages, each one preparing us for the next, each one revealing something new about the nature of love itself.And if that’s true, if there’s this built-in progression from receiving to giving, from being loved to loving like God loves, then maybe the whole structure of human relationships is designed to teach us something.I used to hear the phrase “God is love” and think of it as a theological definition. But now I think it’s more than that. I think it’s not just describing God but revealing the key to a map.Our whole journey with human relationships is the map. Showing us all the different waypoints of love and how they’re all connected and how they interact. And ‘God is love’ is telling us that all that is about teaching us who God is.It is all about teaching us to understand Him better. The different stages of life, the different forms of love we experience, they’re all part of that curriculum.Childhood teaches us we are loved without needing to earn it. Siblings teach us to love those we didn’t choose. Friendship teaches us to choose love freely. Romance teaches us to love vulnerably. Parenting teaches us to love sacrificially, creatively, without expectation of return.This whole progression is God revealing Himself to us, piece by piece, through the very structure of human relationship. Life itself is His way of teaching us to recognise Him.Once I understood this, something about my own life suddenly made sense.I’ve been exhausted for years. Not just physically tired, but soul-tired. I wake up with this constant anxiety that I need to perform, to achieve, to prove I’m enough. Even after accomplishments, even after success, the feeling never goes away. It just resets. The bar moves higher. The treadmill speeds up.I’m a grown man, a husband, a father and I’m still trying to earn something from someone who isn’t even keeping score anymore.I’ve spent so much energy trying to earn something, but I could never quite name what I was trying to earn. Love? Respect? The right to exist without apology?And then it clicked: what if I’m exhausted because I never fully learned the first lesson? What if I’ve been trying to earn what was already mine?I can trace it back. The subtle ways love got tied to achievement in my childhood. The praise for good grades that felt like love. The disappointment over failures that felt like withdrawal. Not malicious, not intentional, but still there. Still teaching me that I had to earn my place.And now I’m terrified of doing the same thing to my daughter.Because this exhaustion isn’t just personal. It’s generational. It’s systemic. Every parent who didn’t fully receive that first lesson, that they’re loved simply for existing, struggles to give it to their children. We love them for their achievements, their behavior, how they reflect on us. We pass on the performance. We pass on the exhaustion.When you don’t know you’re loved just for being, you spend your whole life trying to earn what’s already yours. And then, without meaning to, you teach your children the same desperate dance.This is why what I’m learning with my daughter matters so much. It’s not just about us. It’s about breaking a cycle. Every time I love her in her neediness, every time I delight in her simply because she exists, I’m writing different code. I’m teaching her the first lesson properly. I’m giving her what every human being needs: the knowledge that she is loved without needing to perform.We’re not just learning about love. We’re deciding what kind of love gets passed forward.Yesterday, my daughter cried uncontrollably when her mother was out. Probably feeling anxious about the separation. A few months ago, I would have felt only exhaustion and anxiety. But as I comforted her, I found myself thinking about this architecture of love I’d been discovering.Here she was, giving me nothing but need in this moment. And here I was, loving her fiercely anyway. And maybe, just maybe, she was learning what has taken me my whole life to understand: that she is loved before she does anything to deserve it.She doesn’t know it yet, but through these moments, she’s receiving her first lesson in the curriculum. The same one I received. The same one humans have been receiving since the beginning.And one day, if we do this right, if my wife and I can model healthy love, if we can show her that conflict doesn’t mean disconnection, that vulnerability is strength, that love accepts and transforms, she’ll pass it on. Not the anxiety. Not the performance. But the truth that love isn’t just an emotion or a choice or a commitment. It’s all of those things, yes, but it’s also a kind of participation in something larger. A way of being that reflects the heart of God Himself.Each form of love I’ve experienced, childhood, siblings, friendship, romance, parenting, has been like a window into a different room of the same vast house. Each one showing me a new angle, a new colour of the spectrum. And together, they’re giving me a fuller picture of what love actually is.Life itself seems to be one long education in love. Each stage, each relationship, each chapter revealing a new piece of the same design.And maybe that’s the point. Maybe God keeps finding new ways to show love to us. Through parents, through siblings, through friends, through spouses, through children. Until one day, we finally recognise it for what it’s always been.Not just something we feel or something we do.But Someone we’re learning to know.Thanks for reading Just Reflections! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://justreflections.bhekani.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">justreflections.bhekani.com</a>

October 7, 2025

Traveling Makes Kings (and Exiles)

Before my wife traveled to Zimbabwe recently, we sat at the dinner table one night chatting, and she said she felt some type of way about going home. Not dread exactly. Not simple excitement either. Something more tangled. Love and distance sitting next to each other, both equally true, both equally present.I understood exactly what she meant. That mix of longing and apprehension. Wanting to go and wanting to have already left. Missing home while wanting to keep the distance.We talked for a long time that evening, circling around something we both knew but struggled to name. The conversation kept returning to the same uncomfortable truth: home doesn’t feel the same anymore. Not really. Not in the way we used to fit there, effortlessly, without thinking about it.We love the place we come from: Bulawayo. I miss it in ways that surprise me, in the middle of ordinary days when I’m doing something completely unrelated and suddenly the longing hits like a physical thing in my chest. But loving a place and fitting in it aren’t the same thing. We’re learning that the hard way.Maybe you know this feeling too. That pull toward home that sits alongside a quiet dread. The way you count down to a visit with genuine excitement and genuine anxiety living in the same breath. The strange guilt of missing a place while simultaneously knowing you can’t stay there long. If you’ve felt this, if you’ve tried to explain it to someone and watched your words fail to capture the complexity, this is for you. Not to fix the tension but to name it. To give you language for what you already know inside but can’t quite say out loud.I love reading fantasy. Right now I’m working through The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. It’s a long series. Fourteen books. Epic in every sense of the word. While on a walk yesterday, I finished Book Five (I was listening to the audiobook) and as I was reflecting on what I had just experienced, that conversation with my wife came back to me and wouldn’t leave because I’d found something that explains the feelings we were having.The story of the Wheel of Time follows a group of young people from a farming region called the Two Rivers. Small, quiet place. Everyone knows everyone. But they’re forced to leave the Two Rivers to go on an epic adventure. One of them, Rand, discovers he’s the prophesied Dragon Reborn. By Book Five, he’s learned to channel immense power that could level cities if he loses control. He’s seen wonders and horrors that no one from the Two Rivers could imagine. He’s made choices that ripple across nations, decisions that affect the lives of thousands of people he’ll never meet. He carries the weight of the world now. Literally.As I reflected on the ending of book five, the thought that was stuck on my mind is that there’s no way Rand could go back to the Two Rivers and fit in anymore. He’s become too big for it. The shape of his life has changed so fundamentally that the old mould can’t hold him anymore.While I haven’t quite gone on an epic adventure of world-changing proportions, I know that feeling. I live in it.There’s a saying in isiNdebele. ‘Ukuhamba kuzal’ inkosi,’ which translates to ‘Traveling gives birth to kings.’ When I was a boy, I thought it meant wealth and status. Kings as men with big houses and German cars that never break down and people who never stand in line at the bank. Now I know it means something quieter and heavier and harder to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it. Travel enlarges you. It stretches the borders of who you are and what you can see and how you understand the world. And once you expand like that, you can’t shrink back to your old size. Not without incurring a cost, anyway. The box that used to hold you comfortably now feels too small.Bulawayo raised me well. The city gave me a lot I needed to become who I am. It was a good childhood. A happy one. I have many fond memories.During the week after school, I rode bikes with friends. We were a small gang of boys, and we ruled our little corner of the world with the absolute certainty of children who don’t know yet how small their kingdom is. We wandered the suburbs exploring. Down streets we weren’t supposed to go down. Into yards we weren’t supposed to enter. We walked kilometers and kilometers without thinking about it, without getting tired, just moving for the sake of moving and seeing what was around the next corner. Then we had to rush back to be home by six. That was the rule. Six o’clock before parents returned from work. We came back with dust up to our knees. Thick white dust that got into everything. You had to wash your legs before getting into the house. Rinse off all that evidence of your adventures before you were allowed to sit on the sofas or walk on the clean floors.If I was hanging out at a friend’s house around mealtime, I’d be counted in automatically. No one asked if you’d eaten or if you were hungry. You were there so you were fed. The same isitshwala and mbida at every table, part of the shared life.Back then, every adult was your parent. In theory and in practice. If you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing, any adult could correct you, and you accepted it because that was just how things worked. You knew all your neighbors. Not just their names but their business, their struggles, their joys.It was a small world. Homogeneous in ways I didn’t realise then. We were all black. Almost all Ndebele. We all went to the same types of schools and the same types of churches. Our parents were teachers or nurses or clerks or government workers. Solid middle class or aspiring to it. We had the same references, the same jokes, the same understanding of how the world worked. Everyone fit the same basic mold with only minor variations.But it was the whole world. It was all I knew, and all I needed to know. The edges of that world felt far away, theoretical, not something I’d ever actually reach.Then I left.School finished. I worked for a few years. Opportunities appeared. I went to South Africa first. Then eventually moved to London. Each move feeling necessary at the time, practical, the obvious next step.But those moves weren’t just geographic. They weren’t just about changing addresses or learning new streets. They changed something fundamental to how I saw the world and my place in it.South Africa was the first crack in the homogeneity. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who weren’t like me. They spoke different languages, practiced different religions, came from different economic realities entirely. I met some who grew up so poor that my middle-class Bulawayo childhood looked like luxury to them. I met others who grew up so wealthy they genuinely didn’t understand what it meant to worry about money.I remember the first time I met someone who’d never been to church, who hadn’t grown up with any religion at all. It broke something in my brain in a necessary way. In Bulawayo, you could assume everyone was Christian. Even people who didn’t go to church regularly, even people who weren’t particularly devout, still operated within a Christian framework. They knew the stories, the references, the basic moral architecture. But here was someone who didn’t. Who saw the world through a completely different lens. Who’d built their ethics and their understanding of meaning from completely different materials.And there were people. A whole community of people who became our people for that season. We found a group of friends in South Africa who felt like our tribe. Like the kind of connection that happens once in a lifetime and surely lasts forever. We took trips together. Long road trips filled with singing and food and getting lost, but it didn’t matter because getting lost was part of the adventure. We sang together at different churches, our voices finding harmonies that felt like something bigger than any of us individually. Sunday afternoons that stretched into evenings, having a braai at someone’s house, talking about everything and nothing.It felt permanent. That’s something you come to discover about these seasons. They feel permanent while you’re in them. You can’t imagine a version of your life where these people aren’t central to it. This is our community. These are our people. This beautiful thing we’ve built together, it’s going to last.It didn’t. When we visit South Africa now, we sometimes see them. The friends from that season. We meet for coffee or dinner, and the warmth is real. The love is still there. But something has shifted. They’ve moved on to new things, new communities, new versions of themselves. We have too. We talk about the old days with affection and nostalgia, but we can’t recreate them. Those people still exist, but that community doesn’t. It served its purpose for that time and then it dissolved, the way morning mist dissolves when the sun gets high enough.That dissolution used to hurt more than it does now. The first time I really felt a community come apart, I fought it. I thought if we just tried harder, stayed more connected, made more effort, we could keep it alive. But communities aren’t just about effort. They’re about season and proximity and shared purpose and a thousand other factors that shift whether you want them to or not. Some relationships endure beyond the community. Those ones you carry with you, fold into the next chapter, hold on to across distance and time. But the community itself, that specific configuration of people in that specific place at that specific time, it has a lifespan.Then London. London has been something else entirely. A city so large and so diverse that you could live here for years and still only scratch the surface of it. On the Tube, you could hear ten different languages from five different countries between Baker Street and Paddington. At work, I collaborate with people from every continent, every background you can imagine. People who pray five times a day. People who have never prayed in their lives. People whose parents own businesses that span countries. People whose childhoods included winters that got to -40 degrees Celsius.Each of these encounters did something to me. Stretched me. Challenged assumptions I didn’t know I was making. Showed me that the way I grew up wasn’t the only way, wasn’t the default, was just one option among infinite possibilities.And once you see that, once you really internalize it, you can’t go back to thinking your small corner is the whole world. The box expands. The borders move. You become larger than you were.And here too, in London, we found people. Different people. A new community. We’re part of something now that feels good and right and like it might last forever. Except we’ve been here before. We know how this goes. We can feel it already, the subtle shift. Not everyone at the same pace. Some people moving toward different things. The community is still beautiful, still real, but we’re not at the apex anymore. We’re on the other side of the hill. The slow, inevitable drift has begun. Now I’m learning to hold these dissolutions with more grace. To honor what was without demanding it last forever. To let the community be beautiful for its season and then let it go when the season ends. To trust that the next place will have its own people, its own version of belonging, its own sweet spot before it too shifts into something else.When I visit Bulawayo now, I aim for a sweet spot. Two weeks maximum. Week one is pure delight. Landing at the airport and stepping out into that heat that hits you like a wall. The heat in London is never like that. It’s never this specific, this thick, this full of dust and sun and something else I can’t name but would recognize anywhere. The air smells different. Feels different on your skin.People light up when they see you. Literally, like you’re returning from war. Someone will say you look darker or lighter depending on their mood and the light. Someone will inspect you closely and declare you’ve gained weight or lost weight, both said with the same mix of concern and approval.You greet everyone. That’s important. You have to get it right, or the elders will talk about how you’ve lost your manners overseas.The first morning you wake up early. Not because you set an alarm but because your body hasn’t adjusted to the time and also because the sounds are different. Birds are singing in the trees at five in the morning. A rooster somewhere in the distance, because even in the city people rear their own chickens. The neighborhood waking up with its own particular rhythm.You take the long way to buy bread. You don’t need to, but you do it anyway because you want to pass that corner where you used to meet up. You want to see if the tree’s still there, if the wall still has that crack in it, if the world has stayed the same in your absence. Mostly it has.Friends come by. Friends you haven’t seen in years but who fall back into conversation with you like no time has passed. You laugh from the belly about stupid things you did as kids. Remember that time when. Remember when we. The stories get better each time you tell them, embellished with time and distance and affection.For those first few days, it’s all warmth. All belonging. You fit into the spaces you left behind like a hand sliding into a familiar glove. You belong to this place, and this place belongs to you. You could live here again. Of course, you could. How did you ever leave?Week two rolls in. There’s no clear boundary, no moment when you can point and say here, this is where it shifted. It creeps in at the edges.At first, it’s just a small tug. A quiet discomfort you can’t quite name. The streets feel narrower somehow. Conversations start to loop back on themselves. The government, and power cuts, and the same stories about the same old people making the same choices. You’ve heard these stories before. You’ll hear them again tomorrow. You still love the food. The braai meat, isitshwala, the texture of it in your fingers, the way it fills you differently than anything you eat in London. Smoke in your eyes. It’s perfect. It’s home.But by midweek, something else is present too. You can feel the box. The box has walls. The walls are closer than they used to be. Topics you can’t discuss because they’re too far outside the shared frame of reference. Questions you don’t ask because you know the answer will just confirm the gap. You start to notice all the ways you’ve changed and they haven’t, or they’ve changed and you haven’t, or you’ve both changed but in different directions and now you’re standing on opposite sides of a distance that love can’t fully bridge.You start counting days. Six more. Five more. By the weekend, the sweetness is gone entirely. If you stay longer, nostalgia curdles into something else. Ache. Then impatience. Then a version of yourself you don’t like. Complaining about everything. Feeling trapped in a place you’re choosing to be.I’ve learned to leave before I sour. Before I start resenting the place I love. Before the people who love me start to see that restless part of me that can’t settle.This is the pattern we’ve learned. Most times when that longing for home hits us, we go as far as South Africa instead of all the way to Zimbabwe. Not to meet family necessarily. That’s not the main driver. We go to satisfy the ache without fully committing. To dip our toes in the water of home without diving all the way in.Because South Africa occupies this interesting middle space for us. It was the first place that loosened the homogeneity we grew up with. The first place where difference sat next to you on the taxi without anyone making a scene about it. People from everywhere. Accents from all over the continent and beyond stacking on top of each other. The people at the mall looking like a map of the world. Languages switching mid-sentence. Different ways of being existing side by side.It’s bigger than Bulawayo. It breathes. It has room for multiplicity, for variation, for people who don’t fit the standard mold. We can taste home there, catch the flavor of it in the accents and the food and the mannerisms, without feeling the walls close in quite as fast. We can last longer. Three weeks. Sometimes a month. Before the sweet spot ends and the confinement begins again.This is the part I struggle to explain to people back home. From their perspective, it can look like pride. Like we think we’re better because we live overseas now. You think you’re too good for us. That’s the unspoken accusation, sometimes the spoken one.But it’s not that. I wish it were that simple because then I could just correct my attitude and everything would be fine. It’s not about better or worse. It’s about geometry. About shape and fit. The shape of my life has changed. The container that used to hold it comfortably can’t hold it anymore. Not because the container is bad or small or insufficient. Because I’m different. I’ve been poured into a larger mold and set there, and now I’ve hardened into a new shape.How do you explain that to someone who hasn’t experienced it? There’s a song by Sara Groves called “Painting Pictures of Egypt.” She sings: “And the places I long for the most are the places where I’ve been. They are calling out to me like a long-lost friend.”I feel that deeply. The places I long for most are the places where I’ve been. Bulawayo calls to me. South Africa calls to me. Not as they are now but as they were when I fit in them, when I belonged without question. Not just the places but the people. The communities that formed and felt permanent and then dissolved like they were never supposed to last at all.The song goes on: “And I want to go back, but the places they used to fit me cannot hold the things I’ve learned.”And there it is. The whole ache in two lines. I want to go back. The longing is real and deep and constant. But the places that used to fit me can’t hold the things I’ve learned. Can’t contain what I’ve seen. Can’t accommodate who I’ve become. And the communities that once held me can’t reform because we’ve all become different shapes, traveling different roads, even if we still carry affection for what we once had together.And then this line, the one that really gets me: “I am caught between the promise and the things I know.”Between the past and what’s coming. Between what was and what might be. Between the comfort of the known and the pull of the unknown. Between the place I came from and the person I’m becoming. Between the communities that were and the ones that might yet be.That’s where I live now. In that caught-between space.London is not home. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the way Bulawayo was home when I was a boy, and home meant the place where you belonged without having to think about it.Some days it feels like it might become home. Days when the city reveals some new corner, some unexpected beauty. Other days, it feels completely foreign. Like you’re an actor playing a role, always slightly outside yourself.I have small rituals that stitch a sense of belonging in it. A particular bench in a park where the light falls a certain way in the afternoon and I sit and listen to my book. The Turkish restaurant where I order the same thing every time. A church where the singing rises in a way that feels like worship, even if it’s not the four-part harmony I’m used to.So, I pack Bulawayo into my pockets and carry it with me. A proverb that surfaces when I need it. A recipe I recreate in a kitchen thousands of miles away that never quite tastes right, but it’s close enough. The cadence that returns to my voice when I’m tired, the way I spoke when I was young, slipping through. I carry South Africa in my stride. That wider breath, that willingness to occupy space without apologizing. And I carry the people from there who still reach across distance, who check in, who remember. Not the whole community, but the threads that endured.I’m learning to be in many places at once without being torn apart by it. To hold multiple identities without having them collapse. To accept that communities form and dissolve and that’s not failure, that’s just the rhythm of a life lived across many places. It’s exhausting. The constant negotiation, the code-switching, always standing at the border between worlds. Always saying goodbye to communities that felt permanent, always starting over with new people, always carrying the grief of what dissolved and the hope that this next thing might last. But it’s also rich. I see things people who’ve only lived in one place can’t see. I understand multiplicity in a way that only comes from living it.Frodo saves the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. He endures everything to protect it, to make it possible for hobbits to keep living their simple comfortable lives. He succeeds. He returns. The Shire is saved.But he can’t live there anymore. The hearth is warm, but he feels cold in a way that no fire can touch. His friends celebrate and feast and marry and settle into peace, and he can’t join them. Not really. He can be physically present, but he’s not there the way he used to be there. The journey has marked him too deeply. It has changed him in ways that can’t be undone.So eventually he leaves. Gets on a ship and sails away to a place where the changed and the marked and the unbelonging go. It’s not defeat exactly. It’s just honesty. An acknowledgment that some transformations are irreversible.I think about that a lot. About irreversible transformations. About the ways we save the places we love by becoming people who can no longer fully inhabit them. About how we form communities that feel eternal and then watch them dissolve, not because anyone did anything wrong but because that’s what communities do when the season changes.This hits especially close to home for so many people I know. My friends who left Zimbabwe. My friends here in London. Most of us didn’t leave for adventure or curiosity. We left for survival. For opportunity. To earn enough to support families back home. To pay the black tax. The responsibility to send money home.But here’s the cruel irony: the places that pay you enough to save home are the same places that change you so fundamentally you can’t fit back home anymore. You see different ways of life, meet people with different values, and form new reference points. Your frame of reference expands. Your assumptions shift. The way you think about time, about work, about what’s possible - it all changes. Until one day you go back and realise you can no longer inhabit the place you’re saving.The tax isn’t just the money you send back. It’s the piece of belonging you trade away to earn that money. You can’t have both. If traveling makes kings, it also makes exiles. That’s the part the proverb doesn’t say out loud, but it’s there in the subtext if you know how to look.The crown is vision. The ability to see farther, to connect dots across greater distances, to understand complexity and multiplicity and nuance. That’s the gift. That’s what you gain.The exile is the cost. You belong less easily. Home becomes complicated. The borders that used to feel solid and protecting now feel like walls that are too close, too rigid, too confining. Communities that felt permanent reveal themselves to be temporary. Relationships that seemed unshakeable shift when distance enters the equation. You can’t unknow what you know. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You can’t shrink back down to fit in the space that used to hold you perfectly.That’s freedom in one sense. You’re not limited to one way of being, one way of seeing. The world is larger for you than it is for people who never left. It’s also grief. Deep and ongoing grief for the simpler version of yourself who fit so neatly, for the belonging you can never quite reclaim, for the communities that dissolved, leaving only the sweetness of memory.I’m learning to let the freedom expand me and let the grief soften me and somehow keep both happening at the same time. It’s not easy. Some days I do it better than others.I don’t aim to fit perfectly anywhere now. I think I’m done with that as a goal.Could I go back if I had to? Yes. Humans are adaptable. Some people I know found middle grounds I didn’t - stayed closer to home while still expanding, or settled in nearer countries where the distance isn’t quite so far. Given enough time and necessity, I could reform myself to fit the old mould. But I’d have to make myself smaller. I’d have to let go of all those other places I’ve seen, those other ways of being or carry them silently, never speaking about them, living in permanent longing. Before circumstances force me to shrink back down, I’m choosing to honor the new shape I’ve become. To carry multiple homes instead of fitting completely in one.Perfection was an illusion anyway. It only felt perfect because my world was small enough that I couldn’t see beyond its edges.Now I want something different. I want to carry this expanded world faithfully. To let it make me kinder because I’ve met people unlike me and learned they’re still deserving of dignity. To make me more curious because every person might have a completely different map of reality. To make me less certain that my way is the only road. I want to keep space at my table for someone whose map looks nothing like mine, whose journey led them to conclusions I don’t understand. To listen more than I defend.I want to honor the communities that form without demanding they last forever. To leave before I sour and return before I forget. To know my limits and respect them.Home is not a single address for me anymore. It’s not a dot on a map. It’s a constellation. Multiple points spread across distance, all connected by invisible lines, all part of the same larger map.Bulawayo lives in me, the dust on my legs after a long walk, kombis rattling past with bass thumping from speakers bigger than they should have, that comfortable embrace of familiarity. South Africa taught me difference doesn’t have to mean distance, that multiplicity is just reality when you zoom out far enough, that beautiful communities can form and then end and that’s fine. London is teaching me to be many things at once without apologizing, to build home from scratch in a place that doesn’t know my childhood and forces me to be myself in the present tense. To start over again, with new people in a new place, knowing it might not last but showing up anyway.The constellation moves when I move. I carry it with me. Every place where I’ve stopped long enough to become a slightly different version of myself. Every person who walked alongside me for a time. Places and people. Enduring connections rather than permanent communities. Many ways of belonging rather than one.The work is simple in concept, difficult in execution. One star at a time. One small ritual. One phone call. One visit before I sour. One return before I forget. One season with people who matter. One graceful goodbye when the season ends.That’s the work I’m learning. And if you’re reading this, maybe it’s your work too. Find your sweet spot. Honor it. Respect it. Return before you forget. Leave before you sour.And know that you’re not alone in this strange expanded world. Some of us are walking this too. Carrying constellations. Learning to belong partially in many places rather than completely in one. Building homes that move when we move.Thanks for reading Just Reflections! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://justreflections.bhekani.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">justreflections.bhekani.com</a>

32 total episodes available

Deep-dive analytics for Just Reflections Podcast

Frequently asked questions

Have a different question and can't find the answer you're looking for? Reach out to our support team by sending us an email and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

What is Just Reflections Podcast?: Impactful ideas that challenge my thinking. I hope they'll challenge yours too. <a href="https://justreflections.bhekani.com?utm_medium=podcast">justreflections.bhekani.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

Legal Disclaimer

Pod Engine is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected with any of the podcasts displayed on this platform. We operate independently as a podcast discovery and analytics service.

All podcast artwork, thumbnails, and content displayed on this page are the property of their respective owners and are protected by applicable copyright laws. This includes, but is not limited to, podcast cover art, episode artwork, show descriptions, episode titles, transcripts, audio snippets, and any other content originating from the podcast creators or their licensors.

We display this content under fair use principles and/or implied license for the purpose of podcast discovery, information, and commentary. We make no claim of ownership over any podcast content, artwork, or related materials shown on this platform. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

While we strive to ensure all content usage is properly authorized, if you are a rights holder and believe your content is being used inappropriately or without proper authorization, please contact us immediately at hey@podengine.ai for prompt review and appropriate action, which may include content removal or proper attribution.

By accessing and using this platform, you acknowledge and agree to respect all applicable copyright laws and intellectual property rights of content owners. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or commercial use of the content displayed on this platform is strictly prohibited.