Stage 10 loadshedding and 137 km from home!

On Saturday 25 February 2023 Sally and I had a wonderful day out. We had gone to Danger Point lighthouse to see where the HMS Birkenhead is memorialised. I was going as a tour guide so that I could familiarise myself with this special tour destination in the Overberg Region of the Western Cape. Sally was with me for the fun and pleasure of being there since she had done a lot of research into the Birkenhead for her interest in writing of youth.

We were in the middle of nowhere, 137 km from home, on a road the to the southeast of Caledon, with which we were not familiar. We were looking at the transformed landscapes of FRs 11 Western Rûens Shale Renosterveld that is not statutorily conserved, about 1% is conserved in private areas, and only about 13.9% remaining in its natural state. I took photos of the agricultural fields that had totally transformed almost everything that we could see around us. 

The FRs 11 Western Rûens Shale Renosterveld that is totally transformed at this site where I took this photo.

Then something happened that stretched Sally's coping capacity. 

I noticed that my phone battery was nearly dead! I was aware that I needed to get Sally home since we had been out for more than 7 hours and we knew that we had some distance to go to reach home. I turned off my phone and we drove off. Without my phone, we could not see how much time it would take to get home. 

Sally tried to use her phone, but Google Maps was not working. I was driving and could not check what the problem was. We were in our personal state of Stage 10 loadshedding! No power! No navigation! Eina!

Well, as I think about it now, we had solutions available, but my mind was occupied by driving and so I was not able to sort out the problem. This got me thinking about what, to us out there, was a really difficult situation. I had turned off my phone in order to not make it impossible to use my phone should it become critical to do so. Could we risk using it and then having no power should a dire emergency arise?

As it happened, we discovered later that we had solutions readily on hand.

• There was a power bank in the car that I had been given on an educational tour of Robben Island. 
• We had power cables that could have been used to charge the phone in the car. 
• I discovered that Sally's data had run out and that was why her Google Maps was not working, an easy thing for me to sort out with my phone, even with her phone. 

But at the time we were more conscious of the potential problems that were threatening us than the solutions that we had available. This can so often be the case in life. 

🤔 Or am I the only person in the entire world that ever faces a problem and has important and pressing things that make it difficult to mull over all of the possible solutions that are right there, waiting in the wings to just come to our rescue if we will simply call them onto our busy stage? 🤔

Well, perhaps this is somewhat in line with the sinking of HMS Birkenhead. Solutions were found for problems.

• 'Women and children first' was a solution for who should escape first from the sinking ship. This practice became known as the Birkenhead Drill. It had been used in the preceding century, but became notable in HMS Birkenhead and later in RMS Titanic.
• A lighthouse was built to prevent future tragedies at Danger Point where submerged rocks hundreds of metres from the shore caused the Birkenhead to sink.

May we focus on problems in life rather than on becoming blinded to readily available solutions because we fixate on the problems in our lives, as real and obvious as they might be. Our creator built us with intelligence that we need to use to be fruitful, multiply, replenish, subdue and have dominion on the Earth and not be stymied by life's challenges that are part of the opposition that we need in all things.