Volume 65 December 2026-January 2026 : Reality Hub

……………WALKING IN YOUR SHOES……………….

By Otshidile Onkabetse

Take for instance me seeing a frog just after the rain,  hopping to different places joyfully and glowing with the fresh rain water shining from its skin, and just moments later, I see it sprawled out on the road dead, after being squashed by a car which left its organs smeared on the tarred road (sorry for being too graphic). You`d find that the one who did that didn`t notice, or didn`t care to notice…..and like everyone else, he never saw the frog`s worth. I would put myself in the frogs` shoes…. (Well….not that it has any) I would then be grateful I wasn`t that frog, I`m not a cat with nine lives but being human is still more beautiful. So I thank God for the shoes I`m sitting in now.

I put myself in other peoples shoes, possibly your shoes….from the bank teller to the CEO of a major company, the glamorous life I may live and the family I will bring ups….I also wonder if all the business transactions I make to better my life are legal and moral…do I add crucial aspects to society or do I steal and rob from my own society? I put myself in the shoes of an abused woman/ man in the home, whose joy is stolen, but she/he still smiles and takes care of their family. They strives to please their spouses only to receive a physical or emotional blow….I walk in the shoes of a lonesome individual, whose mocked by His/her society for being ‘different`  their purpose seems so far off and their self-esteem is at rock bottom and no one sees them as worthy of anything good…

I picture myself as... that homeless child, begging for clothes and bread from people who are tired of giving….because they are tired of my begging…I am alone in a world that is too busy to care…. I imagine myself as the constructor who builds mansions or double story buildings…but can never earn enough to afford to live in them. the person I build for does not see me worthy of dining with him or even allow me to sit on his expensive leather chair nor drink coffee with me in the very same office I built with my very own hands….I look up at the building wearing tattered overalls smiling at the beauty my hands have created, but no one would believe me if I told them that I did it… no one has ever thanked me. I put myself in people`s shoes, from the domestic worker who toils hard to feed her family or the one who is tempted to steals morsels of food to feed her extended family and then I dare to wear the shoes of a rapist who is faced with a jail term.

I don`t know maybe to most it is a waste of time that I chose to sit for a moment in peoples shoes no matter how bad the shoe smells I still manage to stomach it for just a moment. Unbeknown to us we can learn from that ‘mental` experience, you don`t have to be the wearer of all shoes types and sizes to learn a bit of how life may be for the next person. When you learn to do that you realize you are not in a world of your own, you have people who may have more than you have or less than what you can imagine yourself having. Then with all of that comes…….appreciation.

 …. no matter how torn, old, smelly and ugly the shoes I manage to wear are. I not only look at the lives of people to appreciate my own , (not in an insensitive way) but maybe I could strive to help those who need serious psychological, monetary, spiritual, social intervention and even help myself in the process. When you learn to see other people from just merely being useless to you and when you for a moment take the focus off your own important life and look at the world around you to see if you can change the world….it`s not as ambitions as it sounds...Because the world awaits you to make it what you wish for it to become….You are not isolated, you make up that very world I`m talking about. So if you change you, then to a large extent you are changing part of the world and if you change that world you impact the world around you which will then be well off in time...

We see things in different ways, so maybe after a day in someone`s shoes ‘I`….. Not to mention ‘other people` would be in a better position to understand why people do the things they do, so that before I can blame the herd boy for killing a goat and eating the meat, I could try to understand why he chose to do that.. I picture being a corn on someone`s foot, however unbearable that would be, I could handle it for a moment because with that I`d be able to see someone`s steps and keep track of where they go, or possibly not…maybe a mole; though it`s not as attractive as a beauty spot...Ok maybe those are not the best of things one can want to be. Maybe I should be a fly...I would hover over someone`s head, I could handle the-rolled-up-newspaper smacks from people seeing that I would obviously be a nuisance…but still it would be nice to be that small just for a moment…for I would be able to put myself in your shoes….figuratively! ENDS

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