Friday, January 22, 2016

TRUE LOVE

The first time I wrote a book, someone said, ‘That’s great. Take it to your Dad. He’s Chairman of the Education Committee. He can get it on the curriculum.” And I said, No. Not because it was wrong. But for what I think success is, not so much as what you achieve, but how.  For the rot in Nigeria is not a person, but the little compromises we’re groomed to make at every entrance, no matter how minute the elevation it leads to, to get in. Yes. Never enough to say – Judge me sir. And if I am good, let me pass.

Have you ever tried insisting on this? You will find what I have found – a hunger in the land, a crippling hunger that’s blunted the edges of our spirits. No. This is not poetry. This is a description of an all too common fear, one that regularly advises us against acting out our deepest intuitions, all because ‘the naira is falling’, and ‘interest rates are rising’, and ‘there are no jobs’. So, rather than see a seed and let it grow, we demand of it a bribe – first – so we can ‘feed our children’.

But who has not also been a victim of this thing we all do? Tell me how many times it has been said to you – ‘Oh, yes, I know you’re the right person for the job, but…’ ‘Oh, yes, I know you’re telling the truth, but…’ ‘This project, this concept, is a beautiful one, I know, I know, but…’ Too many buts on the road to Paradise; turning faces from the sun, bending us all into hunchbacks with rote responses to the big questions of Life. But diversification is not the top-down policy you think it is, sabotaged only by an unimaginative government. No. It is you too who continues to sit behind a desk accepting what a monolithic economy gives you to do.

For people are people, you know, we like to travel with the herd. But sometimes – and this is also true of people – the heart may nudge you towards an idea you cannot find in any textbook, a career that does not yet exist. And on the morning after it does, you will wake up and find yourself toying with this mysterious belief, one that nothing you know or ever experienced can explain, that – connection or no connection, masters degree or no masters degree, empty wallet or no empty wallet – there is enough power in your focused mind to do what you just dreamed.

Honestly, many of us will consider this for a few seconds…this inexplicable urge to begin to pursue something we do not presently stand a chance of becoming… then laugh out in derision, and continue with Life. Yes. But for those who will still wake up the next day, and the day after, and the day after, with the same thoughts knocking on the windowpane of your hearts; let me say this. Should you decide to grasp it with both hands, that urge to live from inside out, and begin to use it to strike repeatedly against the cold and hard and unyielding ground of this country, you will discover something I am even now discovering. That there is nothing in the world that is more frustrating. Yes. That there is nothing in the world that is more satisfying. Yes, yes. It is always like this with our acts of True Love.

14 Feb 2016.

Love and Poetry Live.

Image taken from:
http://jennifercovington.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/follow-your-heart-print.jpg

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