wisdom is for sharing

It’s the end of the month, about that time when people with jobs get paid. No, I did not get myself a job. At least not yet. I have taken the time to pay a couple of things forward, like the distilled wisdom of a wannabe wise man who’s becoming more man (and not less wise… At least he hopes there is some of that wisdom left over for when life becomes serious) as time goes by.
It shall take the form of a list, mostly because lists are good for keeping track of what has been said.
Here we go:
1. You don’t know everything
It is not a good way to start, I know. We all want to believe that we know all there is to know about all there is. But the thing that has a particularly melancholic beauty is that we will never know all there is. It is beautiful, because in the desire of knowledge comes a humility and lessons that add a ton of value to life.
2. Your mission, should you accept it, is to take the most you can out of life
Life is a quest, where we are all given a bag at the beginning and tasked with filling it. The instructions are not difficult. But the task itself is. Sometimes you find yourself in a garden of love, and you try to fill your bag with it, but you find that your bag can only take so much. And you will love so many people that your bag will overflow. or you may love one person so intensely that you will fill your bag many times over. But that is not all there is to life. You will feel pain. And bitterness. And sorrow. You will also feel hope. And happiness. And joy. All these feelings, they are your heart’s way of reminding you that you are alive. That it’s going to be alright. That you are not entirely lost. Eventually, even if it happens slowly, you will find your true north.
3. Remember what you took in number 2? Give it back. Some of it at least.
You are not alone here, in case you haven’t noticed. And part of your job is to transfer the things that you feel to other people. become a filter, so that what you give off is pure. Your bag is not just for you to go around collecting stuff in, it is so that you can open it, lazily in the shade on a hot sunny day, or bundled up indoors while it pours outside, so that you do not end up with so much that you explode, and in the same fashion you will get your due. Share.
4. Appreciate what you have
Life is fleeting. Some things are constant, like death and taxes (especially for the employed… lol), but life is wild and dynamic. Hoping that things will be the same, and ruing about times gone by do not help anyone. That said, your choices in the past contributed to your situation now, so be careful, because the decisions that you make now will affect your future, one way or another.
5. Don’t give up…
The biggest pool of untapped talent is the grave. There are way too many people who have died without realizing what potential they could have achieved if they only just applied themselves… Fine, life is the worst constructor there is, throwing in valleys and walls every so often, and when you think you’ve turned a corner, you find you have to start all over again. or just quit. Before giving up on the world and deciding that it does not deserve you, think about it, you just might be doing it wrong. Dust yourself off and try again.
Speaking of trying again….

Have a good one, whatever your ‘one’ is.

temporary insanity, or what hangs out in the dark side of my brain

A second-hand life, living within the lines that have been drawn already, because anything outside the lines is wrong…
The inevitable truth is that we are not the people we want to be, that we have ideals we want to aspire, but with time the ideals are diluted until they are hardly recognizable. Individualism is shunned, because it is in direct conflict with society. It is no longer a society if people do whatever they want, because societies are there for people to belong to, to feel safe in, right?
Wrong.
Individualism is alright as long as it doesn’t show up too prominently. That is how it is sold and packaged, like you can show how much of an individual you are by wearing different colour shoes from everyone else, but that’s about it. When you start thinking different, that is dangerous. You start contributing to the decline of social order. Everyone doing what they want is chaos, it can only lead to trouble, it has to be stopped. The individual cannot think for himself, the individual is there to be thought for, to be used to contribute to the benefit of the group.
That is where conventional wisdom went wrong. Due to its nature, conventional wisdom can often be mistaken for foolishness. Because we all agree to agree does not make something right. The Earth being flat and at the centre of the universe was conventional wisdom for quite a while, it had supporters, people were killed for claiming otherwise, because it was limited to what people could see and hear.
Life as we know it is a series of events designed to destroy the individual and make him dependent on others. That is the essence of society, a sense of belonging. And the sense of belonging is heightened through pointing out and persecuting those that do not belong…
The thing with life is that it always seems original, that at some level we are the first people to do the things we are doing, but usually, unknown to us, someone else has done the exact same thing. Like it or not, we are all living second-hand lives. To make it worse, the things that make us original and unique are suppressed until they are lost, discarded like milk teeth that have to give way to the permanent set. And like molars that show up and hurt like hell, growing up means having to adopt things. Fine, it is alright to be inquisitive as a child, it is part of the learning process, but at some point, the need to know is killed through the idea that all the answers are in education, that knowing what you are supposed to know is secondary to knowing what is true.
Being intelligent is good, as long as that intelligence translates to measurable gain. Having a massive IQ, for instance, and not being able to apply that intelligence in the real world is a drag, conventional wisdom argues, because everything is supposed to benefit the human race. The real world is often designed to melt everyone down to their basic form and cast them in a mould so they can fit in. It’s like having a jigsaw puzzle. The way things should be is that everyone is a unique piece that has points where others attach, while the way things are is that everyone is a complete, one-piece puzzle, or a Rubik’s Cube that’s glued together so the colours don’t mix.
That is why there are no more renaissance men. In the Renaissance, individuals sought to learn more about their world than what was presented to them, that is how there were such interesting combinations as painter/sculptor/lawyer/doctor. The joy of knowing more about the world was more important than what had already been established. But with time came specialization, because individuals would be better suited for a society if they had a purpose. The Renaissance man was abandoned, the specialist became the ideal. Knowing everything about everything became secondary to being the best you can be…
The question remains, are we still individuals or has our fundamental wiring been changed so that we can only survive within a society?

The sweet life…

Week 4 of school, and so far things are going… well.
More responsibility than ever, I’m even turning down stuff to do coz my schedule is just way too tight. I have Fridays free, free from class. But not free from other things, like AIESEC and extra-curriculars and such.
And to make it worse, my success is my own worst enemy. Like the more I get done, the more I get to do… Finishing stuff on time means getting more stuff to do that’s not even mine…
But still, college life rocks.
Wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
Even the caffeine-driven Coke days that start at 7 and end at 3am the next day… Even those ones. Sleep is for the sleepy.

To college. May it rock, and rock, and rock.

Still feels like the first time…

Another song reference… The Rasmus’ ‘First Day of my Life‘.
Today marks five months since I started my internship at UNEP. And it also marks the end of my internship. I go back to school next week. And it has been an interesting 5 months. The weird thing is, I still feel like I did the first day I came here… Like all the while I’ve been here is one gigantic circle… I have come full circle.
I ahve met some interesting people, from all sorts of places, Siaya, Mexico, Ireland, just over there in Parklands, Machakos, Canada and all sorts of other places…
I was horribly awkward to begin with. This was an internship, not a real job. But that didn’t make it any easier to do. First, I imposed a dress code upon myself. Shirts and ties. So much so that it was generally assumed that that’s what they expected me to wear… Then there was the fact that despite being an environmental job, it just involved sitting at a computer all day, typing away, tagging documents to make a pretty decent output site for environmental assessment documents. And test-driving an eLearning system for the environment as well. Good stuff.
With time, I settled in, I learned the names of the guys in the office, and we even went out for lunch and *kinda* got drunk on day 1… There was wine, it had to be finished. That was quite a welcome.
On to the serious stuff, that was done with trepidation first. While I was jazzed to get my job description and having something to do, having just witnessed a strike from the inside that effectively ended my higher education, for a while at least, there was the sheer mass of unknown that came with this internship, like how I was to work right across the corridor from my mother, and how I was in a position of responsibility unlike any i have held before, a regular day job. So with the newness came the neophobia, the fear of all things new. But slowly, like concrete, I settled. And it felt… right. Like I was made for this gig…
So I left for 3 or so weeks to go back to school to do exams, and it was weird. Like I had worked, and I had found something I was good at. School was supposed to be the great unifier between what I want to achieve and what I have. Like my skills are what will put food on the table. but somewhere along the way, I realized I had found something I was good at, making a bit of money from it, and I realized I actually quite detested being in school. people I can’t relate with, a course that makes sense some times, other times it just contradicts itself, and other times it’s just plain boring. i get bored very easily. I need constant stimulation. And I found that school provides very little of that. So I got into other things, to challenge myself and get the gears in the old brain turning.
So I finally found something that gets me stimulated and thinking and using my brain, and now I have to say goodbye to it, as I go back to school… Alas, you can’t have it all, it seems. So it’s back to the books, back to the grind.
I shall miss this place.

Eco-hypocrisy

There’s a raging debate in the office about how to save the environment and conservation of power and water taht was started by a suggestion to save paper… I work at UNEP, the UN’s environmental governance and slow-motion planet-saving agency (as opposed to whizz-boom-bang, Superman style), and some of the things that happen here are in direct contradiction to the suggestions they make and the end result is a series of massive windbags. Ok, I’m on the fringe, being as I’m an intern, but still, this does not make any sense. Saving the Earth, one paper-and-ink intensive report at a time? I don’t think so…

This is what you get for not counting me…

So the National Population and Housing census is well underway, started on Monday night and we even got a public holiday out of it. We, here refers to everyone else, I had an exam to do. But it got me thinking, what is the relevance of all this? There’s controversy over the tribe question being as we’re only just starting to recover from the trauma of post-election violence. We being the folks in Nairobi… There’s places outside the city where the violence is still all too real… Every 10 years, money goes into counting people. Money that could be used in other ways, like for example, to make the said people’s lives better… Like this guy, a pensioner and retired teacher that doesn’t see the value in him getting counted.
Ok, while I se the value, being as I have done a bit of population dynamics and planning for populations (both first-year environmental planning units), it could have been planned better, even with a diary.
For one, the exercise should have been put on a Friday, so that the weekend can eb used to ensure that people are at home, rather than putting it on Monday then forcing a public holiday… And it’s been done before, that’s how they did it in ’99…
There’s the contentious question of tribe. I for one, do not want to be identified by my tribe. As a result of circumstance, I have no father. I don’t speak my mother’s language. I was born in MP Shah Hospital and have lived in Nairobi all my life. As such, for me, the idea that my tribe defines who I am is a fallacy. I have been identified alternately as Generation X, the dot com generation, the 90′s generation, the future and many other random things… But ultimately I am part of an increasingly frustrated generation, with potential denied and such. I’m the one they’re planning for. The next census expects to find me settled, employed and with my own household to do a survey on. The future is no longer as safe a haven as it once was. The way markets are collapsing and such, investments lost, it will be increasingly liquid. And jobs will be hard to come by as well… Now I want the planning minister to tell me what he’s going to do with that info.
And I still haven’t been counted…

I want my brain back please…

It’s getting harder and harder to think for myself… I have come to realize that my ability to think original, coherent thoughts has waned rather fast. Like now I have become too tired and occupied with getting over the intricacies of life, now I just let everything in…
I’m in a position of responsibility. That in itself means I have to do three people’s work. School’s closed. Add another five people. Budgets to do, emails to send out, sanity to keep… The usual.
And I’m interning. I’m supposed to be doing that now, but nobody’s watching… Cats and mice
I’ve been having interesting, intricate dreams… means I’m getting more REM sleep. Good sign. Like one where my uncles, all five of them, and me, were sitting down for a chat. There were other people I can’t remember. Getting life lessons. Ok, that’s where I was like, is my brain trying to tell me something, like perhaps I need a father figure, or worse, all those ‘getting married’ stories I was getting will come true sooner rather than later…