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What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

Youth is wealth beyond measure—the gift of time in which to be and become.

Do not squander it by blaming others, wallowing in self-pity or surrendering yourself to constant criticism. Lift your head and live. Make mistakes, learn, choose again and keep moving. Feel the texture of life while time is still generous.

After much contemplation, I gathered my own advice to the younger generation in my book, The Letters of the AR-MAN Knight: eighteen letters from the mature Knight to the younger Knight, each inspired by one statement of the Knight’s Creed.

These are not mere affirmations. They form a code by which to live—a path rooted in wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.

Read the Knight’s Creed slowly. Ponder it deeply. Do not merely agree with its words; test them against your own life.

🕯️ The Knight’s Creed of the 18 Sacred Runes 🕯️

ᚠ. I am the bearer of the Sacred Flame; I kindle life through noble intent.
ᚢ. I descend into shadow and rise anew; the strength of the earth lives in me.
ᚦ. I stand at the threshold; no falsehood passes the watch of my soul.
ᚮ. I speak as one anointed by Light; my words are vows woven with reverence.
ᚱ. I walk the line of Law and Star; in rhythm and ritual, I fulfil my vow.
ᚴ. I forge myself in action; my lance is will in motion.
ᚼ. I embrace the breaking as the shaping; in the storm, I find the form eternal.
ᚾ. I bow to the chalice of fate; in service to what must be, I am made whole.
ᛁ. I become still as the sword on the altar; in silence, I remember my Name.
ᛆ. I rise with the light of dawn; in my radiance, justice finds form.
ᛋ. I shine with earned glory; the Light within is my eternal standard.
ᛏ. I give myself for the greater design; my sacrifice is a seed of eternity.
ᛒ. I bring forth the hidden gold; in me, Spirit finds a body.
ᛚ. I flow with the Breath Divine; every trial is an initiation into deeper grace.
ᛉ. I am the temple of abundance for all; through me, humanity remembers itself.
ᛣ. I bow to the inner death; from the ashes of the self, the Knight is born anew.
ᛅ. I unite blade and chalice; in honour and love, I become more together than I am alone.
ᚷ. I give all into the act divine; in sacred gift and gesture, I become the Grail.

Youth will pass, as all seasons must. But if you live deliberately, it will not be lost. It will become the foundation from which wisdom rises.

© Jurgens Pieterse. All rights reserved. 2025

Slay the traffic demon!

What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?

Cape Town stands among the world’s finest tourist destinations. Resting at the foot of Table Mountain—one of the New Seven Wonders of Nature—and offering an extraordinary variety of attractions, it is undoubtedly a city worth visiting. Irrespective of where you live, Cape Town will seduce you with its beauty.

But this metropolitan city, with its rich and diverse population, has an Achilles heel.

Traffic.

Like an ugly beast, the traffic brings highways designed for speeds of 120 kilometres per hour to a grinding halt. If there is an accident, you are stuck. The estimated arrival time on your GPS slowly changes from a few minutes late to the point where you begin wondering whether you will arrive at all.

The problem is partly geographical. The city lies within a V-shaped landmass, with a massive mountain occupying the centre of that V. There are only a few major roads leading in and out. Cape Town is more than 300 years old and was never designed to carry modern traffic volumes.

So, if you want to improve the city, improve its transport infrastructure.

Build a ring road above the existing buildings and roads, allowing traffic to flow more freely around the city. Construct a major bridge or tunnel connecting the Foreshore and Blouberg. Create another tunnel entering the city through the mountain. Two new routes in and out, supported by a ring road to distribute the traffic—and Cape Town could finally have infrastructure worthy of its fame as one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations.

Proposed infrastructure enhancement for the Mothers city

Want to host the world’s biggest sporting events? The new Cape Town would be ready. Want to stage an international conference? The CTICC would be the place. Visitors could arrive on an international flight and, within moments, enter a city offering easy access to seascapes, mountains, deserts and forests.

How, then, should Cape Town be improved?

Slay the traffic demon—and set the city free!

Note: no actual demons were hurt during the writing of this article.

Finding peace in my garden

This morning, I open the blind of my sitting-room window to let the soft light in. Outside, the world carries the freshness of rain, and the clouds soften the morning light. The greens of the garden dance before my eyes. A bird hops through the grass.

There is nothing spectacular about my garden, yet it is a place where I can simply be.

Often at night, standing in the garden, I feel connected—as if I can breathe with the trees. Mostly evergreen and local, the foliage surrounds me. A tree or two stands strong, reaching into the sky. There is the bush that grows with such vigour that it must continually be kept at bay; the spekboom, known for returning oxygen to the air; and the flowers that bloom to invite the little honey-sucker birds to visit.

To an outsider, my garden might never win a show prize. For me, however, it is a place where I can breathe and allow meaning to arise within me.

As the sun begins to rise earlier in the spring mornings, the garden invites me to leave the room and enter it as my sacred temple—a place where I can participate in the forces of creation before the day fully awakens.

Budget travel, deeper experience

What’s your best tip for budget travel?

What’s my best tip for budget travel?

Stay at home.

Seriously. You can’t beat the price. 😄

But if you insist on actually travelling, keep it simple.

Travel light. Stay with friends when you can. Ask people who already have the means to travel for help or advice. Keep visits short. Skip the expensive tourist version of a place and mingle with the locals instead.

You don’t need to see everything, buy everything, or do everything.

Take less. Spend less. Stay briefly. Live locally. Live with awareness. Make every moment count.

Budget travel is really just minimalism with a change of scenery.

Discovering the book that was already there

Today, rather unexpectedly, I wrote a book.

That sentence is not entirely accurate. The book had already been written. I simply did not know that it was a book yet.

I started with a collection of pieces I had written over time — observations, memories, reflections, humour, frustrations, stories about work, family, ageing, technology and the peculiar business of being alive. They had accumulated as individual writings, each complete enough in itself. Today I asked ChatGPT to look across them and see whether there was something larger hiding among them.

There was.

What began as an exercise in organising writing themes slowly became an act of discovery. The pieces were not as disconnected as they appeared. Beneath them ran a surprisingly consistent thread: a man looking at his life while still very much living it.

That distinction became important.

This was not going to be a book in which I stood at the end of the road and explained what I had learned. Nor was it going to be a self-help book dressed up as autobiography. I did not want to become the wise old man dispensing answers from the mountaintop. I am still climbing the bloody mountain.

And occasionally wondering why I chose this particular mountain.

The chapters began to find one another. Stories that had been written independently started forming a journey. Humour became important because life itself refuses to remain solemn for very long. Some chapters carried weight; others allowed the reader to breathe. Gradually there appeared to be a rhythm to the whole thing.

Then we asked a more important question:

What is the reader experiencing while travelling through this book?

That changed the exercise again.

It was no longer enough for the individual pieces to be good. There had to be a reason to turn the page. A movement had to take place — not necessarily towards an answer, but towards greater recognition. Ideally the reader begins by reading about my life and somewhere along the way quietly starts thinking about their own.

That may be the real purpose of the book.

We looked at repetition, pacing and humour. We considered where ideas were being explained after the story had already done the work. The editorial principle became increasingly clear: tighten the writing without polishing the fingerprints off it.

I want my voice to remain there.

The slightly mischievous observations. The contradictions. The moments where seriousness suddenly trips over something ridiculous. The willingness to admit that I sometimes understand life beautifully in retrospect and considerably less successfully while it is actually happening.

By the end of the day, something existed that had not existed this morning.

Not merely a collection of writings.

A book.

And then another idea appeared.

The book should not simply end.

At the end there should be an essence — perhaps 18 Principles of Living Life Fully. Not commandments. Certainly not another grand system explaining how everyone else should live. Rather, principles distilled from the journey through the book.

Something the reader can carry away.

More importantly, something that points backwards.

The final pages should somehow return the reader to the beginning, except now the beginning looks different because they have travelled through the book. A circle rather than a straight line.

I like that.

There is still a foreword to write. I deliberately want to write that after careful deliberation. I need to discover what I want to say before the reader enters this strange collection of stories that somehow became a coherent journey.

There is also an epilogue now, standing separately from Chapter 19. That feels right. Chapter 19 belongs to the journey. The epilogue belongs to the moment after the journey, when the reader and writer stand for a while looking back at where they have been.

Tonight I find myself amused by the whole thing.

I have spent years designing systems, frameworks, architectures and models. I tend to assume that meaningful things must first be designed and then constructed.

Today the opposite happened.

The thing already existed.

We simply recognised its pattern.

Perhaps there is a lesson in that too.

Not everything meaningful in life needs to be engineered into existence.

Sometimes you live it first.

Then, one evening, you look back and discover that somehow you have written a book.