Author: phumzile qwaqwa

  • My new baby

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    I recently had a baby. I’ve always wondered what kind of parent I’d be one day. As much as we all love our parents, I think we sometimes punish them harshly for their mistakes and forget that it was also their first time. Yes, you may not be the firstborn… but you are unique compared…

  • Ten steps behind

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    When I was 8 years old my mother enrolled me in an English-medium school in town… a school where everything was taught in English, including English itself. I was coming from a village school five minutes from home where we even learned English in IsiXhosa. This new place was a different world. You were even…

  • The purpose of life is a life of purpose

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    I recently came across a stat that stopped me mid-scroll. People in their first year of retirement have a 40% higher chance of getting a stroke or heart attack than people who are still working. That’s not a small number. And it made me wonder… what exactly happens to a person when they stop having…

  • Everyone has lost their tastebuds

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    When I was 15, I did something stupid.The irony is, I thought I was being smart. I was in Grade 10, and we often had to write essays for different subjects. One day, our Life Sciences teacher gave us an assignment: The Effects of Deforestation. Because it had the furthest deadline, I told myself I’d…

  • You Don’t Lose People by Being Wrong

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    It’s surprisingly easy to make enemies. I use the word loosely here… I mean people who simply end up disliking you. And I’m becoming more convinced that it doesn’t take much. One subtle way this happens, one most of us probably never notice in ourselves, is the need to always correct people. To always prove…

  • How to have original ideas

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    If you’ve been around computers long enough you might have heard the term “bug” – a flaw or error in a software program that causes it to behave unexpectedly. There are debates over who coined it. Some credit Thomas Edison in an 1878 letter. Others credit Grace Hopper, the American computer scientist and mathematician, who…

  • Whose Life Are You Actually Living?

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    Imagine you woke up in the middle of an indigenous tribe deep in the Amazon. You don’t speak their language. You don’t know what they eat, how they get promoted, or what education even means to them. Is it learning how to hunt? Learning guerrilla warfare to invade neighbouring tribes? I don’t believe how we…

  • The people you’re trying to impress won’t be at your funeral

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    I almost died yesterday. Well, it’s hard to say whether I would have died or not, but I was held at gunpoint, and guns kill, so I think that first line is a fair assessment. The strange thing is that this happened on my last night in Cape Town, just before heading home to the…

  • The worry isn’t AI – it’s kids not learning how to think

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    In primary school, we were subjected to the torture of writing essays on our first day back from the holidays. It was torture because the essays were in Afrikaans and I wasn’t a big fan of the subject.. mostly because I sucked at it. So writing a full one-page opstel (“composition”) was never fun for…

  • What Moves You Moves Everything

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    by

    phumzile qwaqwa
    in

    “The body must be trained to match the mind. A cultivated spirit housed in a withered body is a contradiction.”— Yukio Mishima The Hostel Days I was 15 when I first truly understood what movement could do beyond the body. I was in a boarding school in East London and had this very buff friend,…