NAKED BUT NOT EMPTY

I remember growing up as the second child in a family of half a dozen children. My position afforded me the special opportunity to experience the birth of my last two siblings with some kind of a teenager’s maturity. I remember my mother and her midwife friend bringing them home from the hospital and people flooding in our house to express their happiness and share in the blessing of celebrating a new life but all of that did not interest me. Inquisitive as I had been and still am, I was mostly fascinated with scrutinizing the baby. I checked out the eyes, ear, nose, mouth, I guess I was looking to be sure that my latest sibling was whole and had some family semblance. I always wanted to be the first to declare whose eyes or ear or hair the new born had and was eager to receive the kudos for a right “diagnosis” but in the midst of all these, all these years I had pondered on why the babies hands were always coiled into a fist! I couldn’t unravel it then but maybe I have some illumination on the matter now. I will share that with you shortly.

I remember this particular incidence that was spun out of my curiosity, I burned to know why the baby always wrapped both hands into a fist and so I decided to do a little experiment of my own. That fateful day, I crept into the baby’s room when I was certain my mom wasn’t looking, I began to force the fists of a soundly sleeping baby open! I wanted to know what was in there and why the baby did not open her palms like I did. I did it surreptitiously alas; the baby’s cry brought everyone storming into the room. It was almost going to be doom’s day for me but thank God I found an advocate in a neighbor who read out my thoughts claiming to have experienced the same thing from her son who was about my age. She assured my mother that I was only looking to find whatever I had imagined was in the baby’s fists. Well, I did weep profusely though I wasn’t beaten and that was the last time I tried to force a baby’s fist open. The curiosity left me but the phantom of the question unanswered haunted me for a whole decade and a few years until last week.

Have you ever seen a newborn?
Your answer, of a surety is a resounding “yes”
How do they come?
Clad in Dolce and Gabana suits? Entirely made up with MK? Wearing Armani’s aqua di gio? Carrying an 18 inch Brazilian hair? Oh and of course holding onto a super smart phone?
Certainly not!They come naked. You came the same way, I did too! I didn’t come with a ball pen in my hands or a computer fastened around my waist.
We all entered this world naked but intriguingly loaded because in those tightly folded fistful little palms we bore all that we will ever need to succeed on planet earth. Yes, we came holding tight in our palms our destiny.

The creator of mankind knew from the start that we didn’t require raw gold, white diamonds, silver whatever precious stone you can imagine because encoded in the seemingly emptiness of a newborn’s palm is DESTINY- an active ingredient for success, that endows us with the ability to fulfill purpose and achieve greatness undeterred. A newborn realizes that and consequently holds on tight to destiny but sometimes as we age and are starred in the face by real, hard life we tend to forget how we came into this world and what we brought along with us.

We should never lose sight of the fact sometime in eternity; an assembly of immortals decided our entry into this world and the respective channels we were to come through. Subsequently, something of extreme value was placed in the hollow of our palms.
You being who you are and where you are today, your parents, siblings, friends, spouse, hometown, state, nationality, ethnicity, temperament and everything that constitutes you is not a scientific experiment that went bad or a game of cards. You are here to fulfill an eternal mandate and until you do, the greatness lying in your palms lies wasted.

Look inside of you because you came with a unique gift for your generation and posterity. Forget a father that neglects his responsibility, a friend that constantly lets you down, and a spouse that betrays you. Who says your success is a variable that is dependent on how anyone treats you? On the contrary, I am bold to sound it to you sans a tinge of doubt that their neglects and betrayals are a detour to rapidly push you to fulfillment if you get going! Intransigently resolve to surmount every impediment! Meticulously scrutinize your inside and you will find a prodigy!

Indeed you arrived NAKED BUT you certainly are NOT EMPTY!!!! You are loaded; find that invisibility that fills you up, it is all you require to make an indelible impression here on earth............................     

  

THE SPIDER

One delicate thread after the other

Meticulously arranged, intricately woven

Spin, spin, spin!

Her arms steady

Stealthily placing one line over the other

From dusk to dawn, sunrise to sunset

She toils,

Determined and focused, she nods in approval

Appreciating the work of her hands

Her world was taking shape, her dream

Spin, spin, spin!!

She labored, unimpeded by difficulties

Getting weary, she shunned her protesting muscles

All for the beauty of her creation

Behold, it stands before her eyes

Her home, hand crafted palace

Perfectly, exquisitely spun and woven

Excited, she crawled out

The whole world must see

Their eyes will widen as their hearts will simultaneously grow with envy at one glance at her palace.

Assembling the clutter, she took the lead

Beaming as she showed the way to her home

Her heart skipped a bit, pounding faster in its cage.

The convoy froze!

Adults shook their head in utter sorrow

Youths protested with exclamations

Children lamented with thundering wails

A heart saddening scene, all that was left of her dream, her creation –

A thin swaying thread!!!!

Inconsolably she sobbed

What inhumanity she cried!

Her master piece had been obliterated

If only she had realized sooner

Never to build her home in another’s house she thought.......

The site where beauty once stood had quickly transformed into desolation

She couldn’t live a dosser’s life

Her heart stopped

The clutter mourned an icon but had all learnt a salient lesson, one that would not be forgotten in haste.

Wondering what this is? It is a story about a spider and her most cherished web which unfortunately was built in another’s home. You know what happens to a spider's web lying around in the house, you must have pulled one down sometime in the past no matter how magnificently woven it seemed.
Same thing happens to us when our most profound life’s affairs are contingent on the faulty and uncertain foundation of parasitism.

Momentarily, it may seem like we have arrived at our permanent destination in life’s sojourn. We tend to relax and our relaxation gradually trails into complacency making us lose sight completely of our parasitic or opportunistic status. We forget to remember that a parasite’s span is only for as long as the host allows.  Severally I have seen great men end up in mediocrity for one reason- falling under someone else’s shadow and founding their beautiful dreams on a wavering landmark that soon is washed away like a sand in a storm.
Someday, unannounced, the host will of a surety show up and will naturally obliterate or liquidate the parasite’s paradise no matter how impeccable it may seem because of the principal reason of misplacement. It will then be a case of devastation and distraught watching one’s hard work and toils disappear like smoke from a fire into the air. Remember that each time you hide under another man’s shadows and build for yourself an edifice in another’s space, there is no disparateness between you and a little beam of  candle light which becomes invisible when the moon shines, a regent which acts like a king until the king be by, an inland brook which is soon emptied into the mains and of course, the spider whose web can be pulled down at anytime without notification by the original space owner. Get your own space, quit hiding behind that shadow only then will you build for yourself an empire that will endure.

"TO KNOW" OR "TO DO"

I have had an obnoxious cold this week that has chronicled inexplicable misery. Each time I sit at my table with a box of tissue at my side to write, my vision blurs, my head pounds irascibly, warm liquid drips uncontrollably down my nostrils and I get immensely disoriented. I however engaged an alternate tactic to put my thoughts together, an augmentation of the efficacy of the mind and the serenity of the night did the magic. Who says being a nocturnal homosapien is a defect! Every night this week I have laid on my bed and with the entire universe snoring, ruminated on what is to be published today and all I kept hearing in my head was this- “illusions never change into something real”
In the sanctum of my unlit bedroom, I had begun to ponder on this phrase. These words had become for me a mantra until providence aided me to assiduously revamp them with this pertinent illuminating scenario.
 
Early this year, precisely in January, I made a trip down west to my Alma Mater, the prestigious African’s most beautiful campus and nostalgia stuck! Walking through an infamous car park at the center of the university, I plummeted down the heights of the memory ladder to a few years before. A reminiscent smile began at the edges of my lips and broadened rapidly, a familiar, distant but very much vivid image stood before me- My elder sister and I, returning from our respective departments after a tedious day of lectures and practicals, chatting animatedly.

Our conversations were always of perfect pictures, illusions that saw all what was wrong in the university and at the same time proffered superlative solutions. All of this we did with our tongues, cackling away like the wren. We were obviously at the zenith of our innovative cycle; ideas came rushing like water that has been dammed for ages and undammed all of a sudden! We had the  ability to know all that plagued the school, stupendous ideas flooded our hearts, waves of utterly incredible and apparently laudable tides of “knowing” what should be done rose steadily in our illusions. We knew all that needed to be done and how they should be done but that was where it all ended. In our chatters!

There was this particular space we kept seeing in our phantasm as a dine and dash place, where people could stop by and have hot breakfast and coffee on their way to classes and have some packed snack as take away. We even had a name for it! We were going to call it “Ray’s place” but all we ever did was talk into the air. One tranquil evening, we were walking back from lectures in our traditional manner, prattling as we usually did until all of a sudden, silence consumed both of us. We halted in our strides and starred flinty at the reality before us- our phantasm was staring right into our face! On that same space we had always envisioned our magnificent “Ray’s place” stood “Kay’s chippy”.

  My elder sister gasped and spoke first,” they stole our idea! She screamed, someone must have ratted us out she continued, maybe a course mate or roomie that overhead our discussion, this is a piracy of intellect and viable innovation she concluded with a grimace. I didn’t say anything because my initial impulse was of silence, one that radiated from the depth of my soul. I had retreated to my calm space and we continued our work that day but in an abstruse silence, each one of us lost in her respective maze of logic. That was not the end, because as that semester passed, we stumbled on more of our unique phantasms in flesh and blood, and it felt like the apparition of ideas untapped haunted us intentionally.

We soon fathomed out with heart wrenching pain that we were not the only ones who got those spectacular ideas, others did! But these other people did what we were lethargic to do; they crossed to the other side of the ocean. They sailed with their ideas from the sea of knowing and docked at the port of doing while we remained adrift, wishful thinking and alas, the valued file which stratified them from us, was their ability to do.

Ideas, we later learnt in the hard way, are like birds in the wild. Flying with extreme liberty, devoid of a tinge of constraint! They pick a mighty mahogany tree to perch on this moment and the next moment are found roosting on top of a tall building, a mast or a pole but at night, when the king of the day must have retired and the sun begins to set, they tarry for more than a moment and that is the auspicious time to take the current or altogether lose the venture.

Terrific ideas do come; I bet you have had one at a point or the other in life. Fabulous imageries must have vividly played out in your head but what have you done? With them!
 
Do you just let these perfect pictures blur and gradually fade away till they are remembered no more? Or, do you wait listlessly till someone else brings them to manifestation?

My sister and I have got a first class experience of the latter and believe me; it sure hurts and cuts deeply to watch your bird come alive in another’s hand. I have been down that lane more than once. There is a tide in the affairs of men, take the current when it serves…………………………….
Do not just know it, think it or say it, but Do it!
The rewards and joys are interred in “doing” but regret and pain struts in just “knowing”

“If to do were as easy as to know where what were good to be done, chapels had been churches and poor man’s cottages, princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instruction” Shakespeare said this in “the merchant of Venice”.
As you continue in this special 8^th month of year 2012, make sure you stop knowing and start doing!