ZEST 4 Life Solutions

27/10/2025

Holidays never grow old.

South Africa - Cape Town 27 Oct 25

17/10/2025

Is human compassion failing due to our ego driven desire to get a 'like' or 'comment" in social media? I've been feeling very bewildered by the level of hate, aggression and vile human behavior on our socials of late. The keyboard has become a weapon to cause hurt, harm and hate to innocent people who are simply doing their best like the rest of us.

There is an American influencer Emilie Kiser who despite making global headline this year I only stumbled across her for the first time yesterday.

She’s American influencer and she was sharing a video that started with her looking fairly normal and slowly became a very hard watch. Her pain became visceral, every single muscle in her face was holding her back from collapsing in despair.

By the end of the video you could challenge any woman to not want to jump through the screen and become the safe place for her despair to collapse on.

The point of her video was to address the allegations that she wasn’t grieving or grieving properly, was acting weird since the sudden de’th of her son.

These allegations came in the form hundreds of posts, some of which were viral with thousands of awful comments.

Emilie lives in a huge house that most of her content is created in, she’s a mum and wife with 5 mill ticktock followers.

In May she was out with friends, her husband was at home with with three kids, including a young baby, when Trigg their 3 year old made his way to the backyard pool that had no fence, he was unsupervised and was found unresponsive in the pool and passed away 6 days later in hospital.

Naturally the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind is “why no pool fence?” And from the looks it usually had a pool cover, which I think goes without saying (but I will say it to be clear) isn’t adequate protection, even if it is when it’s on.

And obviously the second thing to come into our minds, well to come into the minds of those with even the very minimum levels of emotional intelligence-
Even if we haven’t been in her position, we know how parental guilt works, we know how survivors guilt works, we know that these things terribly effect even those with no reason to feel guilty so we can imagine how much worse it would be if they did. Then we’d couple that with the grief of a 3 year old son, making the second thing to come in to our minds absolute devastation at the severity of what this woman is facing.

The type of devastation that has always stopped an entire community, town to rally around the family.

But something has changed in us as a civilization and it coincided with the digital revolution, it would seem that while our ability to communicate with each other has grown profoundly, it’s come at the cost of a significant portion of our humanity.

20 years ago if you told me that someone lost her child and there was a socially acceptable pile on towards her- I’d never have believed you.
I’d insist, humans just aren’t like that, we don’t do that. A bit of negative talk in private is about as much as we would ever tolerate hurting someone who was already in this much pain and even that was rare.

What I want to know is what these disgraceful posts hope to achieve? Do they want this grieving mother to hate herself more? To feel worse? To preform for you? To apologize to you, her audience for the loss of her son.

Do they not understand the simple idea of natural consequence? Do they think that this woman’s natural punishment hasn’t already strongly outweighed her crime of not installing a pool fence?

Or is it really just virtue signaling. Using another woman’s agony as an opportunity to show your followers how much of a better mum you are -then that rich influencer who must love her with her pool without a fence more then she loves her children.-

Or are they really naive enough to think that if a woman’s not openly hysterical on line that she’s not feeling deep pain?

Because I had a quick glance at her page and she was never known as an emotionally vulnerable creator, her videos are polished, it’s aspirational content, not the open book warts and all style that other creators take, you didn’t see her on her looking like s*t days in a daggy pair of un**es unable to get out of bed and wanting to dump her husband- that’s not what her followers expected.

So why then expect her to share her most vulnerable state publicly? And even if she was that way inclined- nobodies given her the safe space that she would need to open up on.

You might think I’m an open book, but when I was grieving my dad I saved my sobbing and breaking down for when I was alone in the car. That’s a level of vulnerability I struggle to even share with my bestest friends. And most people are quite similar, it’s an incredible privilege to be the one someone grieves in front of - it’s fragile and tender and thickens the air with a shared heaviness which should lead to the temporary lightness of a shared load.

She’s just trying to get through the days, ease back into work and engaging with an audience that most likely scares her atm.
But she’s smart enough to know, that her permanent pain doesn’t owe your temporary curiosity anything.

Last night while I deep dived the whole thing, I came across creators trying to mobilize a witch hunt, force the police to charge her husband, force her to leave her husband, force a mass unfollowing of her page and force social services to remove her other kids.
And you think she’s going to hand her vulnerability over to that?

This is not the actions of people who just really care about kids safety. No it’s much more sinister than that.

So for whatever reasons these creators have for these fowl posts, I do hope that they know that this was the moment their humanity was tested and I believe they failed.

And Emilie may have lost her boy and she may have made decisions that she has to live with for the rest of her life, but at least she has her humanity.

And there is nothing more empty then a Human experience without the humanity.

Con

16/10/2025

Hello fellow Zesty souls.

I am travelling for the next 5 weeks.

I am currently in Zimbabwe and yestersay I had the most amazing experiemce of seeing Hippo's and Elephants at home in their natural environment.
Quite surreal, so much so tears broke free from my eyes and my heart at breaking point with joy.

I am generally against animals for tourism especially for those held in captivity for human entertainment but this tour passed my own guidlines as we gently cruised along the Zambezi River.

All of this was shared with my favourite people, Tracey, Felicity and Scott.

My soul is happy and at peace on this journey.

When was the last time you felt peacful and totally content?
♡♡♡

30/09/2025

28/09/2025

Drugs... they said it would be fun. This is Flakka, Fentanyl and goodness knows what other concoctions are being injected.

24/09/2025

23/09/2025

Laughing is often a great medicine.

Laughing with family and friends.

When we laugh the entire mind, body and nervous system reaps the rewards.

Laughter stimulates so many organs.
It opens our airways as our breathing changes and our heart, lungs and muscles all benefit from the simple act of laughing.
That's before we even get to how many endorphins are released when your laughter ripples around the brain.

Endorphins give us an overall sense of wellbeing, so much so, that it can temporarily reduce pain.

Laughter improves positive emotions, strengthens our immune system, stimulates cognition, reduces stress and improves our positive ability to cope.

My darling Mum is now lost to the depths of dementia and I find it incredibly hard to see her like that. Just a shell of her self.

One thing that transends the lack of recognition and lack of conversation or any banter meets a blank stare I start to laugh. (it's no laughing matter) Then I start to giggle. Once I get going I can also get Mum to laugh with me. Before long I have her chuckling away and it's in that moment I can see a hint of my Mum in her eyes.🙏

When all else fails - Laugh.

It may not be a laughing matter but your brain and body will be grateful for the reprieve when times are tough.

18/09/2025

Grief has no time line. This beautiful mother kept her babies body with her for 7 months before she came to terms with her babies death. Be kind to yourself and listen to others and the way they grieved to share the emotion of grief with another but please, always honour your emotions and time line. ♡♡♡

The grief of Natalia, the chimpanzee who has carried the lifeless body of her baby for seven months 🐒

For seven months, Natalia, the chimpanzee at Bioparc Valencia, carried the body of her deceased baby. She cared for him and carried him in her arms, as if he were still alive. Bioparc respected her grieving process and let her decide when to let go of her baby.

On September 21, she finally did so, leaving behind a mass of dry skin and bones, but during that time, for Natalia, that body was still her baby. Grief is not only human

09/09/2025

30/08/2025

I did the most beautiful walk today.
Its been many years since I've done this walk and I'm shocked at how much more training I need to do before my Annapurna trip.

My legs are punished... but I loved it.

Where or What is your most favourite Hike, anywhere in the world?