A silent nudge

Dr Fahim Chand | Tuesday December 9, 2025 08:08

A stranger’s laugh on a bus, the soft rain on a tin roof, a memory you thought you’d mislaid, suddenly everything leans forward, asking to be used.

It is quiet and persistent, this spark. It tugs at the sleeve during work, taps insistently at the ribs at midnight as sleep eludes. We pretend not to notice, but it is patient. It knows we will eventually answer.

When we do, the world narrows to a single, urgent pulse. Doubt still whispers, but it is powerless, drowned by momentum.

And when the moment passes, something remains.

A trace of a familiar fragrance, a familiar echo, proof that for an instant we were carried by a current larger than our own will. Long after, we find ourselves humming what it taught us. Later, we begin to recognise its fingerprints on our lives.

A course chosen on a whim becomes a calling. A job accepted for convenience turns, improbably, into a vocation. Even love, so often credited to chance, bears the faint bruise of that same unseen nudge.

We like to tell tidy stories about logic and planning, but the truth is messier and far more generous.

We are quietly rearranged by moments we barely recall deciding upon.

Looking back, the path appears inevitable only because the hand that guided it was invisible. And so we walk on, believing we steer, while listening, always, for the next soft knock. When it swells inside us, emotion learns a new language. Feeling seeks a pulse and a place to breathe. The heart, suddenly rhythmic, begins to measure its joys and fractures in beats per minute.

Silence becomes unbearable; it begs to be interrupted. Fingers search for surfaces, voices for shapes of sound. What was once only emotion now insists on form and expression. Notes rise elevating a raw truth, giving it somewhere to stand.

Even sorrow, disciplined by melody, discovers grace. In this quiet transformation, chaos becomes sequence, ache becomes harmony, and what could not be spoken finds a way, at last, to be heard, in the inevitable spaces of a song.

As listeners, we borrow these arranged emotions and weave them into our own days. A song walks beside us through the morning drive (actually many songs given Gaborone’s traffic), through heartache, through triumphs we experience. It teaches us how to endure, how to hope, how to remember. We press play and find courage in a chorus, consolation in a verse. In this way, another’s inspiration quietly becomes the rhythm by which we learn to live. David Bowie is a name etched into the grammar of musical greatness. His songs now drift somewhere among the constellations, but we are left with the inheritance of his earthly genius.

Ever the chameleon, Bowie absorbed and shed influences as his sound evolved, each phase a new disguise for the same restless soul. His catalogue is vast, yet among its many stars one song burns with a quieter, sadder light.

“Letter to Hermione,” from his self-titled album, is heartbreak set to tape.

Written in the wake of his separation from Hermione Farthingale, it is not merely a song but a confession, an unsent letter finally given a voice.

The ache lingered. For years, small echoes of her surfaced in his work, even in songs that seemed to stray far from love’s orbit.

“Space Oddity,” for instance, introduced Major Tom to the world, a drifting astronaut born less from science fiction than from Bowie’s own sense of emotional isolation.

Life, as it tends to, moved on. Bowie later found lasting love and happiness until his death in 2016.

Hermione, when asked, spoke with quiet dignity, refusing spectacle, preserving what was private. And so the story closes gently: a love lost, a legend made, and a heartbreak that travelled to the stars, only to return as music we still hold close.