I have this habit of drinking hot water with lemon and honey in the morning and evening before I head to bed. A couple of nights ago as I was about to read my book and wanted to make myself a cup with the above ingredients, I realised that I had run out of lemons and there was also just a small amount of honey left that I struggled to even get out through the opening.

But since my throat was in dire need of a soothing and I didn’t just want to drink the hot water by itself, I decided to cut the honey container with a knife in the middle so that I could open and use a teaspoon to draw out what was left. I started to laugh at myself for doing this in fact I said “really Bongeka, now this is desperation at its highest” In this moment I realised something and this brought back many childhood memories.

We have this amazing ability as human beings to problem solve and find innovative ways of making things work when faced with an “unfavourable” or “desperate” situation. The most classic example I can think of was during my early years growing up in the township. I recall that many of our parents couldn’t afford to buy us fancy board games, dolls, car toys etc…and how did we respond to that? Well since every child has this innate need to “play” we invented stuff. I think about the innovative games we had; I think about the cars our brothers invented using wires that were lying around.

My big brother went as far as developing our very own “monopoly board game”. We had been inducted to this wonderful game when we went to visit our cousin who was an only child and we were hooked! Now when we got home we simply could not stop talking about this amazing game we had played. So my brother decided since mummy and daddy can’t buy it for us, he will make one.

He simply took a flat piece of an old wardrobe cupboard, used mum’s pen markers to create the icons on the board; we found some plastic stuff lying around that we used as icons and voilà our very own monopoly.

My enjoy life tip is this- even in the face of lack we can still create something or find a way to make something work. How many of us have used a shoe to hit a nail in instead of a hammer? So my challenge to you is, maybe you have been trying to find a solution to solve a business, school,  relationship, career or ministry problem and you have been attempting tried and tested conventional methods. But I’m saying maybe take a step back and perhaps what you really looking for is a very unconventional way of solving that issue!