ANCIENT JUNGLE.......

Astonished, I exclaimed in exhaustion

It is not here either!

It is all a farce, vacuum I mumbled

Now I feel extremely feeble

Insistently I had struggled through this hurdle filled jungle

Tumbling endlessly in rubble

Desperate to find that twinkle that will calm my jingles

Gaze fixed on the horizon I continued to paddle

Certain I would find it here but no

My head in great tumult as my mind began to juggle these thoughts

“If I had searched through the bubbles, leaving out the jungle, would I have found my twinkle?”

Suddenly, it came to me in a ripple

And as it expanded, I dazzled

Fellow comrades all tremble and stumble deep in the jungle

In their ferocious search, had not sought out guidance

Desperate they neglected the wise gaffer, “keeper of the ancient jungle”

And have all fumbled aimlessly being self-reliant

Awed, I guffawed at their ignorance

Content, I smiled smugly

I solved the puzzle

All I needed to do which no other comrade ever did was to shift my gaze

Yes, to get the twinkle that will calm my jingles

I only had to focus on the gaffer of the ancient jungle

Often times in life we struggle and work so hard chasing after all the pleasant things we crave for but there is a secret we most times neglect or are too busy to discover. A secret that would eradicate and mitigate our struggles as well as save us a lifetime of perturbation. Like a brand new machine could be sabotaged by ignorance on the path of its operator, so can the beautiful gift of life, freely bestowed on us by providence be ruined by a lack of knowledge.

In the midst of our turmoil, pain and incessant labor we ask ourselves if life could get any easier and we are tricked into believing that life has to hurt to turn out beautiful but does it always have to be true?

Imagine two little boys in a toy factory that have just being given a gift of the newest toy train. Euphoric, they raced out of the factory, headed to their respective homes to show off their new trains but they were both confronted with a dilemma back home. They couldn’t get the trains to start!
They tried all they could and it just got harder. Finally, they respectively came up with these decisions.

The first boy thought the factory had deceived them and given them bad toys. He locked up the train in the basement and never spoke of it again. He was fraught with anger.

The other boy got out his bike

WISHFUL THINKING.....

FANTASY WISHING WELL

“What is yours will always come back to you”. Severally, I have heard this axiom spoken and used to imbibe assurance into the simple folks by the seemingly wise and accomplished philosophers but I have always thought that the cliché was overrated. I equally believed that it was mere consolation for complacency, tardiness and ultimately, it depicts dangerous folly.

As an individual, I aptly believe in being ambitious and strategic. I set out to achieve seemingly mammoth tasks and a smug smile lights up my face after every deserved victory. Anyway, another unwavering belief of mine faced imminent alteration or modification as a result of a didactic occurrence early last week.
Here goes my tale:
Diligence, hard work, good deeds, recompense and consequences are popular words in my personal dictionary. I vigorously pursue what I want and trust me, I almost always get it.
However, that has not being the story of my life in the last 16 months. I have had series of disappointments, delays in the stead of my traditional “touchdowns”. The most recent of which became consequential of my publication “FIGHTING” but in the midst of thick darkness, when not a flicker of light illuminated. A pale amber beamed.
Depressed and frustrated over losing something I desperately wanted, I turned to my fall back plan which I had treated with negligence. Unfortunately, it seemed as though my plan B wouldn’t work out too but I was about to become a believer.
Sometime in May 2012, I applied for an MBA in a federal university. I was certain I would be admitted but the admission process stalled and out of pressure from every angle, I worked out a plan B as a strategist, I Picked up another form, this time for MSC in a different university in September, 2012.

It turned out that I didn’t get the MBA admission and this I discovered in January 2013. My only option against my desire was to take up plan B. To my astonishment and horror, plan B had being sealed since November 2012 and admission letters were already distributed. Pandemonium erupted in my head as my beautiful strategy came crashing down and I watched helpless.
Well, like people say, life goes on and I decided to forge ahead. I made a trip to the plan B University for frivolity sake. Guess what I discovered!
An admission letter had already being mailed to me a day before but how? I had no recommendation letter from any one that mattered. I was bemused and decided to look for answers. I later unraveled the mystery behind the admission. After all recommendations had being sent in, received and processed. The department decided to pick out a few deserving candidates using past academic records as criteria and viola! I got in.

It wasn’t my first choice but it definitely has the word providence written all over it.
As I walked out of the Department, I met with my good old buddy and after I narrated my story, he said the following words. ”what is yours will always come back to you”. I guffawed and replied, “that is an overrated cliché” but he didn’t stop talking, he went on to add, “Only if you give it a little push”. Immediately, it hit me like a stone thrown in water and the epiphany widened like the ripples the stone makes. Yes, I gasped. It makes sense now I guess.

Keeping your legs crossed and occupying a stationary position is all dangerous folly and mere wishful thinking when attributed to the axiom” what is yours will come back to you” but the moment you launch out of that inertia and “give it a little push” it will of a surety become yours. So, while I still maintain my stand that the axiom “what is yours will always come back to you” is overrated and reeks of complacency, I would like to note also that I am a believer of the axiom if the prefix “only if you give it a little push” is attached to the end.

Don’t cross your arms and tarry for it to come, push a little, set the ball rolling and see where it takes you. After all, I bought the form first!

  

FREEDOM

 FREE OR BOUND?

 December last year, I witnessed an occurrence that caused a partial volte-face in my definition for the word freedom. I observed that perhaps the concept of freedom was entwined grossly with man’s psychology. In fact, I inferred that freedom is a state of mind and two days ago, while visiting the zoological gardens of the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University, along side my irreplaceable friend of over a decade, I modified my observation into a hypothesis. The incident of the previous year, augmented with my discovery at the zoo led me there.

Amidst the numerous activities that characterizes the yuletide is featured a unique act of benevolence and exchange of gifts pioneered by the legendary Santa Claus and mimicked by the millions of mortals occupying the planet earth and so, in the spirit of Christmas, gifts are given and received.

We received a turkey for Christmas though it has long gone down the sewer via appropriate channels beginning with the mouth, I would love to tell a little tale about our Christmas turkey that was not bound but at the same time not free.
Our Christmas turkey was delivered to us late in the day and so we could not perform the traditional beheading rites immediately. Hence, our Christmas turkey had to spend a cold long night outside exposed to the dangers of the dark. Delivered to us with both feet bound, a unanimous decision was made to untie the turkey in order to give it leverage for self defense just in case!

Here is the baffling thing, we arrived the next morning to take our Christmas turkey on a trip to the slaughter but we realized that it was lying on the same spot we left it the previous night, untied! All through the drive to the slaughter, my mind was ravaged by the thought. I pondered over and over it until I saw the light. Our Christmas turkey had been tied up for so long that it didn’t even realize the ropes had being cut off. It had been held bound for so long it had no idea what to do with its freedom. I was consumed by a heart wrenching empathy for the poor bird.

I felt its pain, for how long did it struggle for its freedom before it finally succumbed I wondered? A tiny rope kept a huge bird bound almost all its life and a night before its demise, the rope was physically untied but our Christmas turkey remained bound subconsciously and didn’t even try to move from the spot!
Freedom is defined as the condition or right of being able or allowed to do, say, think, etc. whatever you want to without being controlled or limited. My emphasis lies on the second part of the definition, “sans control, limitation, restriction, impediment, obstacles” which could be physical (substantial) like in the case of our Christmas turkey or mental (insubstantial) like in this other instance I am about render.

 I met an hyena two days ago while visiting the zoo; of course it was being confined but trust me, it wasn’t some kind of “level A” confinement. I was thinking that the hyena could break out and so I became petrified and perturbed.  I guess my buddy read me like a book, like he always does, and assured me the hyena wouldn’t even move and it didn’t!

I looked closely into the carnivore’s eyes and I recognized a mental exhaustion. It had acclaimed mentally to being bound and nothing could probably ever change that.

You may wonder why I am narrating the story of our Christmas turkey and the hyena at the zoo, don’t you? I believe both stories are didactic.
We were all born free, thank Heavens and we all walk free except for people confined in facilities but how free is that freedom?
It not the presence of shackles and fetters that suggests that a man is bound but his state of mind determines how much liberty he possesses.
FEAR, REGRET, HESITATION, INDECISION are all mental fetters and shackles that limits a man.
The FEAR of what the future holds, REGRET for things that happened in the past, HESITATION to break new grounds and INDECISION over significant matters at auspicious times makes a man crawl where he should have been flying.
What is holding you back? I can very well define it as an impediment, a limitation, or an inhibition but what I cannot do is identifying it for you.
To soar high beyond where the eagles tread, lies the obligation to break out with exigency but break out you can only after you have identified what it is that holds you bound and only you can do that. A wise man once said “the only limitations that will keep us bound are the ones we place on ourselves”
How free is your freedom?
You will never know how far you would go until you let that fetter off and stride on.

REFLECTION

 

 

Look at me, and what do you see? Some years back that really mattered to me. How much I cared about what other people saw me as, what I looked like through the lens of another homosapien’s optics and the adulations from the world until I disengaged from that school of thought.

An inexplicably talented young woman wrote a song I fell head over heels in love with and its lyrics amidst other excruciating soul searching exercise became consequential of my disengagement from the “what do you see” cul de sac and got me trailing the paths of a brand new close I love to call “what do I see” and I ceased from there on to ask the question I opened with because I realized that the efficacy of the answer that follows could come from only one source- me! No mortal could ever unravel the intricacies of another mortal’s being and shed light to the stark darkness of a man’s core save for divinity and man himself and so I made a vow to look inwards always. Not totally disregarding exterior opinions of course but meticulously after intense inward ferocious foraging, subject the exterior opinions to evaluation by the internal findings.

So, each time I stand in front of my body sized mirror, I ask myself this- who is this woman I see starring straight back at me? Trust me, sometimes, my reflection is someone I don’t know! Sometimes I cannot hide who I am even though I try and I wonder endlessly when my reflection will show who I really am inside. It is certainly an odyssey but every day I discover the woman starring straight back at me, I get closer to unraveling the enigma, me!

Maybe you have entirely discovered who you are or you are embarked on the odyssey to fathom out whom you are, I hope you find the paths that takes you straight home and I say congratulations to you respectively! But if you do not fall into any of the mentioned categories, that implies one thing- you are still groping in the dark, struggling and seeing yourself from the optics of the world which in almost all cases is disadvantaged and I am putting myself under the moral obligation to announce to you today that   an imminent danger of inevitable abuse looms like in the saying “a misunderstanding of purpose results inevitably in an abuse of an invention”.

Of all the wonders of creation, a mortal is the most mercurial and so self discovery becomes a herculean but eminently significant task!
Who is the man or woman that stares back at you when you look in the mirror? What does your reflection show?
 
Allow me a partial digression; I would love to share a tale of quaint events, of the times when man survived primarily on hunting and fruit gathering and lived in caves.  In the days of the early man who enjoyed virgin nature- landscapes, sky, water even the air lived two brothers. One beloved of his father and the other