Every Friday, in over 70 countries across the world, people from all walks of life put on their red socks, and go for a walk or run. This they do as an act of solidarity, an act of healing, an act of commitment to positive change and the enduring power of our common humanity.
That sounds like a lot of hope and goodwill to invest in a pair of brightly-coloured socks, but for John McInroy, founder of the global campaign, every pair of socks tells a story.
A former South African national field hockey player, John was moved and inspired by a tale he heard of a pact between South African Prisoners of War during World War 2. The comrades-in-arms promised each other that should they made it back home, they would wear red socks as a reminder of their allegiance.
Following in those heroic footsteps, “Red Sock Fridays” have become a global phenomenon, in turn leading to a series of sporting and community initiatives that includes the Unogwaja Challenge, an annual 1,650km, 10−day bike ride from Cape Town to Pietermaritzburg on the eve of the Comrades Marathon.
Activist for change, social entrepreneur, elite endurance athlete, John is a role-model of the creed he lives by: “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu”. A person is only a person through other people.
John sat down with Ruda for a chat about his views, his adventures, and his plans to change the world, one pair of red socks at a time.
Transcript:
Ruda: Hello and welcome to this session of the Change Exchange. My guest, John McInroy, and we’ve been talking about how I should introduce him because everything I came up with like ShoOops and Red Socks and what is it called … Uno … Help me please?
John: Unogwaja
Ruda: Unogwaja, he says it’s in his past, so what is your present?
J: Well not entirely, I mean that was off air, Ruda. You’ve dropped me in it! What’s the present … whoa … what you see is the present I think it’s been an it’s been a unexpected journey for me the last couple of years and those things that you mentioned … Red Socks, ShoOops … That’s exactly how it started like I had this, this crazy dream, basically a friend of mine and I were staying, we were both South African hockey players, a long, long time ago and I got a job in Ireland and he was a doctor who had been to a couple of Olympics and I said come along, I’m going to Ireland can’t you get a job in Ireland and kind of long story short he came to Ireland and we had this amazing year together and at the end of the year together, Symons was going back to South Africa he wanted to try and play in the Beijing Olympics and we wanted to have something that we could remember each other by and he shared a story about a war veteran who used to come to Grey High School Remembrance Day services wearing red socks, and I’d be like why is this guy wearing red socks and it came back that his name was Sidney Feinson, and was a South African Jewish soldier and he was captured along with 96 other South African prisoners of prisoners of war at the Battle of Tobruk in 1942 and he was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Northern Italy and when him and two friends were there they said if anyone makes it back alive we’ll wear Red Socks to be together and the moment we heard that story it was like wow, it’s like it’s beautiful man, we just gave each other Red Socks said we’ll wear them on a Friday and it I never knew they would have such profound impact on my life and it still has a profound impact I mean, the story continues and it’s connected many people all over the world and most recently, an amazing thing happened, where Sidney … was actually, when he was in the prisoner of war camp he escaped and he’s got a whole journal he’s written, and he escaped and he, he’s was found by an Italian girl in 1943, Northern Italy and her name is Giovanna and she felt compelled to show care and humanity towards the South African Jewish soldier and a huge risk she took him in and her and her family did whatever they could to keep him safe him away from harm’s way, but obviously the risks were total for them and yet they felt compelled and they saw a human, they didn’t see a Jewish guy, they saw a human and basically an Italian woman, I mean the story has grown and grown and people all around the world have [inaudable] but someone heard about this story and has now tracked down the family of Giovanna and Giovanna has passed away, but Giovanna’s son Giuseppe was so blown away by my this Italian woman Costanza who got hold of them and to say do you know about the story about the Red Socks that is spreading around the world that basically was actually started by your mother, and it was just amazing and Giuseppe wrote a book last year and I spoke at the book launch, and I was on Skype in my shorts and my vest pretty much like this and there was this formal book launch and it’s in Italy and I was speaking to a lady on Skype and then she was then repeating it in Italian, which is pretty cool, but it’s so beautiful to think that the core of this story is about humanity. Because often, I mean South Africa is … our past and our current is still like … there’s differences as to how we treat different people … Afrikaans people, white people, black people, women, men and I think to be able to see the human in someone is really beautiful.
Ruda: Let’s just go … you say South Africans, we take our past with us all the time. You grew up half here, half in the UK, and then you came back to study at UCT. Did those … Is that exposure to different cultures … What difference did that make?
John: I can’t really know … But I’ll never forget … I mean South Africa is in my bones and we used to go back as a family every year for Christmas at my grandparents, who lived in Fish Hoek, I mean I loved being South African and that’s interesting because that’s I still love being South African but I see myself more as citizen of the world now …
Ruda: Why do you say you love being a South African? Because it’s a kind of romantic thing that is almost easy to say, but what does it mean for you?
John: South Africa just … It felt like home to me, it was where I was born. I just felt passionate about it. I remember as a kid in 1992 in England watching Jonty Rhodes like diving across those stumps, and I was so fired up and then I had the privilege to represent South African hockey and singing the anthem, and so much history and diversity in South Africa … It felt special. And I don’t want to say that’s changed but my perspective about, you know, this world and I think a lot of the separateness that we experience around the world is about you this is Africa, and this is Zim, and we are black and we are … I see myself as part of one big connected space now.
Ruda: When you played hockey for South Africa … When was that?
John: My debut was in 2003 …
Ruda: Oh okay so that was into the new South Africa already.
John: Yes, I’m not that old. I mean, how old did you think I was?
Ruda: You never know. How did you experience that? Playing for the country, then going to play professionally in France … How did that impact on your life?
John: I mean, certainly hockey enabled me to travel, enabled me to be part of teams and as a young man who grew up largely outside of South Africa and largely unaware of the implications of apartheid, I think my parents wanted us to grow up outside of apartheid. And my dad got an opportunity for work in 1986, I was four years old and I didn’t really have much of a say back then. And so like, I was kind of … I kind of had this some very naive view of South Africa, very romantic view of South Africa, but I think through sport you get to you got to witness a lot of the challenges. And certainly as a young competitive sportsman that I was, perhaps in the beginning, the idea of a quota system … And I want to call it that, because that’s what it was back then, was something really foreign and really difficult for me to understand. But now I look at it completely differently, and I see how the inequality have impacted on people. Like being first hand in Langa and, you know, a lot of people can flippantly say it’s been 23 years or however many years it’s been since apartheid, since the rainbow nation, since Madiba and almost like be dismissive of people with complaints or feeling victimised. And that’s a whole different story, like there’s … Like being a victim it’s not going to lift anyone out of anywhere. But you know, at the same time to understand, like if your parents and your parents’ parents have been exposed and subjugated to what a lot of our countrymen was exposed to, it still is present in you and your collective and your connective tissue, in your feelings and just in everything … And so I see quota system in inverted commas as so important, but I don’t see it like as … in a shameful way …
Ruda: We have to open doors and we have to build a bridge into a different reality …
John: Agreed and it’s a such a complex situation, but that the greatest breakthrough that I’ve had is that the amount of resilience and courage that is embedded in the people in our country that have been up against the wall, let’s say whatever, and I don’t have to say black or white. And all of us have been to certain extent, whichever side you fell on but the my exposure to, like, Langa, the magic that is embedded in those people … It just needs to come out it’s going to lead our country, it’s going to change our country …
Ruda: How did you end up staying there?
John: I want to say how did I end up not staying there for so long. Because it’s almost like … I was I was part of Langa … I remember Thami Tsolekile he was the …. I played hockey against … I played junior hockey for England, and we played in South Africa …. It’s such crazy … In 1996, I think. And one of the guys in the South African team, in Durban when I played for England, was Thami Tsolekile … so I’ve known him for like over 20 years.
Ruda: So you connected then?
John: We connected then, and then I played cricket, but hockey sort of started to be like my number one sport, that I could that I could do well in hockey or whatever. But like Langa cricket were in the Premier League at the time and they were short and Thami just called me and said can you play, and I was like I can play, but I mean I haven’t played for a while and then, you know, he’s like just come. And I never really left. I just mean, some of the experiences I had in Langa, I mean some of the sporting experiences I’ve had with Langa were some the highlights of my career without a doubt. One, on the cricket field when we beat Claremont … We didn’t win many games, but it was like, the celebrations, the kids on the side. What it meant! The excitement. And then … I’ll never forget it when … It was my debut for Langa Hockey, and I’d been overseas, I’ve been paying in France and Ireland and I can’t even remember. And we’d just been promoted to the Premier League and we …. Because we were the basically the bottom team, we played the top team from of the year before, the Stellenbosch University, and Stellenbosch all dressed beautifully, they’re like a few hours before, everything regimented, just right. And there’s us, just arriving in dribs and drabs, someone hasn’t got a shirt, like I remember Thami he was getting changed on the Bishops astroturf. It was an absolute mess! We had like one minute of a team talk. It was … We jumped onto the field and what happened, I’ll never forget it, Paul Blake, who was a teammate of mine in the South African team. A good friend of mine for many years he was also paying the Langa team. And one of the Stellenbosch guys is just nudged him in the back. I’ll never forget it, because literally the whole Langa team just said hey back off. Like that. Everyone just grow … And it was just like this sense of we look after each other and that just inspired something and we had no right to win that day, but we won 4-2 and the celebrations. We didn’t shower, we went into Langa. It was just, it was … And people talk about that game still and embellished hell out of it. I think I scored 700 goals in that game, it was so cool! So the truth wasn’t actually that important, but we did beat them that day, and it was remarkable.
Ruda: It must have changed you … I mean, coming from a … You were a white boy in Cape Town and then you lived in Langa.
John: I’m still a white boy in Cape Town.
Ruda: I don’t think, not per definition anymore.
John: Langa has given me so many gifts. It’s unbelievable and that’s … It was difficult in the beginning because people like, you know, when you, if you move to Pretoria or Joburg, wherever you’re living in, and they say oh awesome congratulations. When you move into a new home. So when I moved to Langa, the first thing people ask is how long will you be there for? It’s like, what? Am I going to prison?
Ruda: The first thing is why?
John: And understandably so. I’m not being, I’m not being facetious or anything, but it was almost expected that in a way I was doing some kind of project or what was I doing there?
Ruda: You must be there with a certain purpose?
J: Yeah, which I think is really interesting because, so many people that had these preconceived ideas of Langa have never been there. And I’ve lived in a lot of places with my hockey through my family moving to the UK. I’ve been exposed to a lot and I had never been exposed to the community and love, like I had been in Langa. I mean, in the beginning people thought as an American tourist, it’s like, oh how long you here for? What are you doing? And the pure joy and shock and magic when you say, ndihlala apha. Ndizalwa lapha eKapa… And you say I’m from Cape Town. And it was really quick … I was at a shebeen … Which, I don’t drink anymore, but I was at a shebeen then and this very drunk guy was like, Sipho! Sipho! I and then my friend Lungile who was in the South African hockey team, he was with me, so then from that day I was Sipho and then Sipho became Thasira, so in the beginning, I had my car in the beginning. And then I never wanted my car. Like, for a long time I was trying to work out how I could live in South Africa without my car. But public transport is a bit tricky in South Africa. It’s not as simple, you can’t just ride around places and then moving to Langa, the greatest unexpected gift was it’s the most connected transport hub I’ve ever lived in and the moment I lost … I sold my car, I started walking in the streets and it just changed everything. I got to interact with people. I got to … like being on eye level and sharing the ground with someone is really special. And even having cycled across South Africa numerous times with the Unogwaja, a bike is a separateness. It stops interaction when you’re on the ground. So yeah, and then in the beginning, it used to be Umlungu, the white man, Umlungu! Hayibo! And then it became Sipho and I can’t explain how loved I felt and how protected I felt and how part of that community I found it was. And the people I just I get like memories and faces that just of beautiful people. So yeah I’ve been truly grateful for my experience in Langa and it’s given me a great insight into the strength of a community like that and the strength of South Africa.
Ruda: I want to take you back a few chapters now. You wanted to do an MBA? This was when? After you played in France, I think. And you wanted to do an MBA, and you got a bursary to go to Dublin University College because of the idea of Red Socks? What was the idea?
John: Yeah, I mean … It was so crazy. Basically I … After me and Sumuo gave each other red socks, we started wearing them on a Friday. People just started to take interest in what I was wearing on a Friday and then more people started to join and at the time in in Ireland, it was a really negative space. So it was like a recession. And people are losing their jobs and people coming to work just, just down and not, not alive. And the Red Socks were just to spark. And then it was like, about a year later, I just had this dream. I just imagined Barack Obama going up to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC where Forest Gump and all the big leaders of have spoken and um, he went up to the microphone and he said he pulled up his trouser. You had a pair of Red Socks chirps. And I just that I was so clear I just saw Red Socks all over the world map and there was clear and the next day I went to my boss and Ireland had been really good to me. So he’s a close friend of mine. Ah. And it has been for many years. His son went to school with me and he actually represented Ireland recently represented Ireland in the Olympics. We had an intertwined life, and I said to him, Frank, I’m resigning and he was like, Johnny, what are you going to be doing. You know it’s not an easy time to be out there and I said and I had a dream about these Red Socks and he was like, huh? I wouldn’t say what he said. And yeah, it’s basically then I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know what the next step was, like where do you start, what do we do now? And I just thought let’s see if I can do the, the MBA. It sounds like fun. Like, let’s just apply and I wanted to do an MBA in France, I applied for one in France, but I had no … It’s huge money to do an MBA. Total waste of money, by the way. But um, but in the end I had an interview in nod and it would’ve been probably better for me not to apply because I didn’t have 30, 40 000 euros. But I was like, let’s just apply, let’s just see it. And I was sitting across the desk from Nick Bonneville, who’s the director of the MBA school in, in Dublin. And he said, um, he, I started telling him about this, basically why I’m here. I just dreamed about these Red Socks. And how it can bring people together around the world, you know, and the common humanity. And he just said kind of flippantly, why don’t you we, we do ideas for future scholarship. There’s no harm in submitting. And I said, you’re damn right. And I just wrote an email, like a one page email, like it didn’t exist or it existed here? No. So often you don’t even share something because you think it’s lame and I have to get it perfect first. I didn’t have anything. I just shared it. Suddenly, like a week later I get a phone call and they said, um, we’d like to give you 15 000 euros for your ideas for the future scholarship. So I was like, wow.
Ruda: You said, really, I have to think about that?
John: Well actually, actually I did because what actually happened was I still had to pay the other half and that’s a lot of money. And in the end the sports department of the university caught wind that they got the fifty percent scholarship. They then funded the other half and put me in res. So I literally got a 40 000 plus euro, um, and then the chairman of Hockey Club used to slip me euros. He’s like, you can’t afford, you have to, you have to be able to buy beers or you know, you have to be able to live. So yeah. And it was like from just sharing that it was almost like a 50 000 euro education and, and what was really cool, a bit that I love the most is I got to do an exchange program in India and that was important for me. I played hockey in India and Afro Games in 2003 and my eyes was so alive in India was just who was embodied, like, people. It’s just a mass of people …
Ruda: And what has happened to Red Socks since then?
John: So Red Socks. So from a business point of view, I think I, I mean, I certainly wasn’t listening in my MBA and, and uh, probably not anyone’s fault other than myself, but for me, that Red Socks were just an incredible story and the serendipity and the, the, the synchronicity that happened and where it led me, I will be forever grateful. But from a business perspective, it was a nightmare. I mean, I remember the one time it was a couple years in and we used to kind of do invoicing and then we’re going through invoices in some kind of bank account and my dad was like, have you realised that there’s like 50 000 rounds worth of invoices that you haven’t followed up? And so that was kind of, it’s been a, from a business perspective, it’s been a nightmare, but …
Ruda: It is now being worn and used in 70 countries around the world?
John: This is the thing for me, there was magic in the fact that we let it be. We didn’t try and market it, we didn’t. It was just a beautiful story. If you want to wear the Red Socks, put in and get involved, be part of it. And it did grow. Yeah.
Ruda: It is now a part of Unogwaja?
John: Yeah. So now we’ve got to a point where like I’ve gone through all sorts of transformations and, and, and like my identity and my entire being, I gave absolutely everything to Red Socks. And then Unogwaja only came about because of the Red Socks. Like, um, the, the Red Socks story about Sidney Feinson and the battle of Tobruk, like a guy called WP van Zyl, I’d never met before and Afrikaans dentist in Cape Town comes to me and he has all these Comrades Marathon history books under his arm and he wants to talk to me and I’m like, jeepers, what was he going to talk to me about? And he started talking about a guy called Phil Masterson-Smith who in 1931 becomes the youngest ever Comrades winner. And his nickname was Unogwaja, which is a Zulu word for rabbit. So I was like, OK, wow, that’s awesome, but why? Why are you telling me this stuff? And I’m always like, I’m getting excited. And he goes, no, 1933 film. Then Smith lived in Cape Town and you couldn’t afford the train fare from Cape Town to ‘Maritzburg. Instead of giving up this guy on a bike and cycled to the comrades. And I’m like, now I’m like, this is a story that South Africans should hear. It’s about overcoming. And that’s probably something that I associate with being South African, making a plan, getting, being resourceful, like not like moaning about what we don’t have, like being grateful for what we do have. I think we need some reminders on that. But it was an amazing story, but still I had this like saying, but why are you telling me like, you know, and then he said, hang, hang on now on the 5th of June, 1942 Phil Masterson-Smith lost his life in the Second World War in the battle of Tobruk. You kidding me? I just was like, I changed my life there, as in I just dived in five months later we were cycling to and despite everyone saying you can’t do it, you’ve got to qualify for combat, you have to own a bike, which is true. Support just came from, from, from putting it out, there, and Unogwaja has been a really special story for me and I think it has an important role to play in South Africa, because …
Ruda: What do they do?
John: Now it’s been an evolution ultimately in our first year, we cycled from Cape Town to ‘Maritzburg. It was a miracle that happened around the Comrades and we ended up raising money for the Comrades charities. And then suddenly in our first year we raised R50 000. In our second year, I just, we had this story was there was more to it, there was community involvement. There was support, there was like inspiration that was hope I’ll never forget cycling outside Lady Frere, rural part of the Eastern Cape. I think there was about 30 of us doing it, long red socks on cycling with a beautiful Unogwaja logo and this, um, this young kid is running to the side of the road and he’s shouting Unogwaja. And I was just like, yeah, an important story. It’s, it, it reaches, it doesn’t matter how. And, and it’s just, it’s just been one beautiful connection after the other. And in 2016 we officially became a public benefit organization. So now it’s the Unogwaja charitable trust and we started to focus on, um, we’ve always focused on empowerment, but that’s evolved as we go along. But, um, we’re now really focusing on pre-primary and early childhood development because like, um …
Ruda: Because you have to start there.
John: It’s like all of these other initiatives and I went to an amazing, um, talk by the DA and they’re talking about the program and it was like humongous numbers, like we talking millions and millions of rands about e-classrooms and all these things that are important. I said, if we haven’t addressed that, you’re throwing your money away. So I got to know this amazing story in Langa because of St. Anthony’s pre-primary school and literally there had been two, um, nuns that have been at St Anthony’s pre-primary school for 51 years. They have served there. What was interesting to me is now I started to get to know the community and people in there. I would say, what school did you go to? Pre-Primary School? You know, I never asked that. And they would say St. Anthony’s. Why did you ask? And then I didn’t even have to ask if, if there was someone who is just someone who is contributing in this community, a sportsman, a teacher, a leader of sorts … You can almost bet your bottom dollar they came from the small schools and I was like wow, if you get the support that you needed, that early age … It changes everything … It gives. Gives these kids. And as I say, the kids of Langa like for me they have an advantage. I wrote an article called the Langa advantage, like I would seriously have trouble if I could afford it and let’s say I could afford to send my kid to any school in the country. I think I’d be more readily ready to send my kid to Langa High than to … I don’t want to say a name, but any of the, the elite private schools in this country.
Ruda: Interesting idea that. But I need to move us on. Sorry. You’ve now written a book and you’re doing crowd funding for it. Butterfly Man. Why? What is it about?
John: It’s about my, my journey from basically not being able to feel my journey of just pushing and striving and trying to be a man and trying to change the world and have an important message at any cost. And for, for so long, for so long, my body was just screaming out for me to stop and I can remember it. The height of my body just being broken. We ended up doing Unogwaja on foot over 30 days, like 60 kilometers a day. I was absolutely broken and I just kept going, kept going, kept going and thinking this is what I had to do. And Unogwaja and Red Socks have been amazing and I’ve had so many people saying, keep it, it’s such an important job. You’re doing enough. At the end of the day, I was broken. I was empty. I was numb. I couldn’t feel. And in the end it was a gift from, from Langa. And unexpected one. And one that was really difficult at the time, but it was the eve of my, my 34th birthday and Mama Ntuthu, has … She’s just such a beautiful woman, and amount of wisdom I learned from her. And uh, in Langa our birthdays, are an opportunity to celebrate for sure and we dance and we sing and we people come together, the doors are open and welcome. And um, so I went to bed really late that night, that night because I knew I just wanted to be free the next day for my birthday and to, to really be present in the experience of being at home in Langa. And um, yeah, that night, I mean a Mam’ Ntuthu used to, she shared a cupboard with me, so every morning before she went, she’s a teacher, amazing. She would come into, often come into my room and just grab something in the cupboard. And so it was a noise and it was just, I always felt at home, always knew her noise, her smell, like it was Mam’ Ntuthu. And anyway, I had just gone to bed. I don’t know how long I’d been steeping for and there were noises in my room and I thought it was a dream. I just wanted it to go away. I kind of knew it wasn’t Mama Ntuthu, it started getting closer to me. And anyway in the end, like I didn’t want to open my eyes. I just wanted it to go away. I was terrified. I was paralysed, and eventually worked out there was someone in my room and it definitely wasn’t Mama Ntuthu, and as I come to my senses the, there was a big, big noise and kind of noise and down the corridor. I still was really disoriented and just sort of unaware of what was happening. And I walked down the corridor and kind of didn’t turn the lights on, didn’t want it and I came back to my room and I remember like, it’s pausing to turn the light on. I turn the light on and I saw all my, my charging cables without any devices on the end. And um, I was, I don’t think it was a dream. And then I walked again kind of still just out of that, completely out of it. And I walked to the kitchen, turned the lights on and the whole window of the kitchen had been taken out. When I look back now, it was the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. Um, someone came there and just quietly in the night took the very things I couldn’t let go of. Like I was attached to my laptop, my software, and I was so driven to try and, and be and do and share that I was kidding myself. And um, yeah, like nothing, nothing, no harm was done. It was obviously a pretty primal experience, but it enabled me to literally give up and just say like, I need to take a break. I need to look after myself. I’m, I was absolutely, I was in, I was in total shock and I’m …
Ruda: Just worn out physically?
John: Physically, emotionally. I was broken. And, and …
Ruda: And so did you write about this?
John: It was just, that was the start of where The Butterfly Man journey started and it’s, the title is really special. You’ll see what it all comes together at the end of the book, but it’s just been the most. From letting go of the things I never thought I could, I could let go of. Um, and I’ve really started to discover like who, who I am and, and, and sort of started to question a lot of things that I just took for granted in my life.
Ruda: But what do you want the book to … Why did you write it? What do you want to do with it, if anything conscious?
John: So number one, the writing of book has been one of the most healing journeys of my life, like to let go and to get out what is inside you. It’s, it’s like a pain releasing and it’s been so healing. So um, I, I ended up getting inspired. Um, and um, I wrote the book on my cell phone on my iPhone. 15 days straight.
I just … Phew! 77 000 words. I mean my eyes were falling out and thumbs were, ended up sending it to this guy who I had met along the way. I ended up to a retreat in Thailand and it’s just a beautiful safe space. So I was just so lucky to find these people and he’s a writer and I just sent him the manuscript and he’s worked on it night and day for the last five months. So it’s like a co-creation now. I think I’m …
Ruda: You’re crowd funding for it? Interesting idea.
John: Yeah, I, I come, we’ve, we’ve just put it out. The whole thing has just been about being open and raw and I really believe it can help people who like this whole world of social media. I was completely trapped because I was speaking and I was orating and I was. I was successful, I was strong, I was muscular, I was athletic, but I was absolutely crying inside for help.
And when you’re in social media, it’s impossible. You’re trapped.
Ruda: You have a Facebook life.
John: Yeah, it was. I was like Superman on the outside and I was crying on the inside and there’s so much intelligence and intuition we can learn from our bodies instead of just push the pain away. Let me march forward, let me take the tablet. Let me do this. If we listen to our bodies, I think there’s so much. Um, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot we can learn there. And I think the thing is, is that if we are gentle to ourselves, we can be gentle to other people and I really, really believe that the way that we interact with other people starts with the way that we interact with ourselves. And it’s just been the most preferred. Like for so long, you know, I had this purpose that it’s like, it doesn’t matter about myself, I don’t believe in it anymore and I don’t believe that my sole purposes is for others, my sole, my sole purpose has to be for myself, and it’s not selfish, it’s an not selfish, is the greatest gift that I can give to myself and to this world. And as part of the launch of Butterfly Man, we are offering courses for people to help them sustain themselves, to help them look after themselves and then hopefully to encourage them to allow their creativity to, to unveil. Because for me, the known, the known that we look around us each day is what is the most scary. It’s the unknown that we have to bring to life. And that is through creativity. And so we want to support creatives around the world, um, to come together. So we’ve got a retreat options and it’s part of the, there’s like a reward system on the Thundafund campaign and you can, you can buy a book or you can also hire me for a talk or you can get a place on the retreat and I hope I really believe in it. Like, I wouldn’t go through this again like this. I mean I’ve been very much away from the public eye for the last couple of years just to, just to be kind to myself. And yet what’s really interesting is that the book started because at the beginning when the, the, the, the Langa experience happened and obviously I was really, really conscious of the fact that, I mean, and Mama Ntuthu has been living in her house for 23 years and she leaves the door open. And I remember when I moved there, the insurance company, I just transferred that to the, the, the, the, the address. And they were like, where do you say you live. And then they asked me all these security questions and basically they wouldn’t insure me. So nothing was insured, which is great because I still don’t have my laptop, which is amazing. But, um, I also felt kind of responsible, um, that there was a break in our house and there was lots of things. I also felt embarrassed that I, I left midway through the season, we had four games left. I was the Langa head coach and player, and we were right on the edge of, of relegation and normally I would just march on. And to tell my Langa teammates and my Langa friends that I was burnt out and it just felt like another white guy letting them down, you know …
Ruda: First world problems!
John: It was exactly that, but I, I had nothing left and I had to do it. And I looked after myself. And then a year later from only having one objective was to, to breathe, to get water on your skin, to feel your senses. I didn’t feel my senses anymore, I was this fit guy … I didn’t breathe. This woman I met, I was telling her about my story and she stopped me and she grabbed me and she said, are you breathing and breathing has been unbelievably profound in my life. And, and it’s led me to … I’m a yoga teacher now, I mean, if you’d asked me a year ago if I was a yoga teacher, I would have said, are you crazy? I’m a, yeah, there’s so many things to share. Um, but …
Ruda: Well, I can only say good luck and may this be the next, next phase in a journey that sounds really amazing with so many completely different chapters. So go well.
John: Thank you Ruda. I really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.
Ruda: Until the next time. Breathe. Walk carefully. Bye-bye.
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