I should be looking for work, but no one has taken my library card away yet and somehow I just keep reading. Today I finished Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, the story of his life as a child and young adult before he found his calling as a comedian. It is as entertaining as one would expect and surprisingly informative.  It is also the story of his mother, who has to be one of the most interesting human beings on the planet, not least because she survived a murder attempt in a way unexplainable by science (a miracle?).

Apartheid was much more complex and crafty than I realized, a patchwork of human categories based on color, circumstance, parents, happenstance, and language, each with its own privileges, and many with the possibility of promotion/demotion: one could even be re-categorized from white to colored or black. It was an ideal system for reducing the likelihood of significant opposition.

The book has some interesting ideas I am musing about. One, the idea that one’s name is one’s destiny, inspired the title of this blog. In South Africa, the two given names of most people were a tribal name and a colonial name. The tribal names had meanings, and Noah writes that often these names seemed descriptive in adults: a fellow named No Worries will be the opposite of a striver, while Be Afraid is mean.

Our older son attended a Lakota-style summer camp for years, in which the boys were given a native name that was meant to be descriptive, though I do not know how it was chosen. If names do affect our life choices, choosing a descriptive name when one’s character is more evident makes sense, though it could still be a burden for someone truly seeking to change later.

Of course, people often live up (0r down) to their nicknames, or to early stereotyping within the family. Even if the stereotype is positive, for example, if everyone thinks you’re the smart one, this sort of stereotyping is often fraught, engendering pressure to achieve or else a sense of fraudulence.

European style names have meanings also, but often we don’t know what they are, and perhaps that is for the best, at least while we are young. My given names mean “new arrival” and “light”, according to Google.

Noah’s two years as a street hustler–payday loans and music pirating–leads to the concept that effort and gain aren’t always linked. Street hustling is a lot of work that doesn’t leave a person with much to build a future on. A more accessible example might be Internet browsing versus reading a book; processing the same number of words for each could have quite different results. This is not a comparison of time spent, but of effort expended. Choosing to spend some of our time relaxing is beneficial, quite different from expending effort for naught.

The last idea that caught my attention, harder to apply but worth pondering, is, Dive in! If you fail or are rejected, you have an answer. If you don’t try, the question–Was it right for me?–will forever be an open one.