When I was a little girl, I had these hand-me-down shoes that I loved. I wore them everywhere. Anywhere, really. I don't think I cared whether they were appropriate for where I was going. If those were the shoes I wanted to wear, then those were the shoes I was wearing. And when they became too small, I still didn't want to let them go. I would squeeze my feet into them and somehow convince myself that they still fit. I imagine an adult looking at me and thinking, Child, these shoes are clearly too small. Please take them off. But I loved them. And I think about those shoes sometimes when I hear us talk about things like seasons, letting go, releasing, creating room, moving on. Usually, when we talk about letting go, there is something wrong with the thing we're letting go of. It has become toxic. It doesn't serve us anymore. It is holding us back. We have outgrown it. We need to make room for something better. And yes, sometimes that is exactly what letting go looks li...
School fires. Public demonstrations. A growing sense of unrest that is often described in different ways depending on who is speaking. To some, these are signs of discipline breaking down. To others, they are signs of frustration finally finding a voice. To others still, they are simply chaos—things that should not be happening at all. But very little of the conversation seems to pause on a quieter question: what if these are not separate incidents at all? What if they are different expressions of the same underlying tension—one that we rarely name directly? Because there is an assumption that sits beneath much of how we interpret society: That what we survived is what should be survived. And what we endured is what should be endured. People often treat their own endurance of hardship as proof that hardship is normal, necessary, or fair. Once that shift happens, survival stops being just experience and becomes instruction: a silent template for how life should be lived. And in Kenya, t...