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December 7 - December 14, 2018
She recognised that sometimes the best we could do was simply to muddle through, getting some things right but also getting many things wrong. She knew all that, and was never too quick to blame or offer reproach.
If you punish somebody harshly, she said, then you are simply inflicting more pain on the world. You are also punishing not only that person, but his family and the people who love him. You are punishing yourself, really, because we are all brothers and sisters in this world, whether we know it or not; we are all citizens of the same village.
When you listen to them, you have to divide everything they say by two, and then take away ten. As you have to do with some politicians.”
“Ah,” said Mma Ramotswe. She did not have strong views on politics. She did not like the confrontational nature of much political discussion; why could people not argue politely, she wondered, taking into account the views of others and accepting that people might differ with one another in perfectly good faith?
Late people are still with us. And they were. They were with us in the things that they had said, which we remembered long after they had gone; they were with us in the love that they had shown us, and which we could still draw about us, like a comforting blanket on a cold night; and, if the late people had had children, they were with us in the look in the eye of those children, in the way they held their heads, in the way they laughed, or in the way they walked, or did any of the other things that were passed on, deep inside, within families.
from the well of security it is not hard to draw the water of generosity.
What can we do to stop those greedy men who want to make everything into a place where they make money? What can we do to stop our country being sold?”
Everything will be judged by money—not by what people want, or what they feel, or what they believe in—just by money.”
“You are a heroine, Mma. You are an eighty-four-horse-power, six-cylinder heroine—you really are.”
Tea, thought Mma Ramotswe—no matter what was happening, no matter how difficult things became, there was always the tea break—that still moment, that unchangeable ritual, that survived everything, made normal the abnormal, renewed one’s ability to cope with whatever the world laid before one. Tea.
For that was a very special sort of love, she realised—love given back to one who loved you; that love was like the first rain, the longed-for rain, which washed away the pain and sadness of the world so that you forgot that those things had ever been there.
