la liberté

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Freedom is an expensive commodity. A commodity that is traded over and over, that is compromised every once in a while to gain something that may be fleeting. That we yield our freedom to protest by clicking Yes to the terms and conditions without reading them speaks volumes.
All around the world, men live in slavery, belonging to others, to work until their fingers are worn to the bone. This sounds exceptionally sad, but it happens all the time. Men don suits and put silk nooses round their necks, spending their most productive years listening to orders and churning out the same stuff day after day. If you ignore the creative spirit long enough, it atrophies and you’re left with a shell…
Set yourself free.
But pardon the music.

slowly comes the light

(or what to do with a quarter century’s worth of knowledge)
So another year has passed, and this one has not been uneventful. As has become routine, I’ll say a couple of things, sound smart, and then walk away.
Life is like a hill… The beginning is hard, where every day you see is a milestone to achieve, then slowly the climb becomes bearable… Eventually the peak is reached, the height of physical achievement, then the downhill stretch that’s either thoroughly enjoyable or absolutely terrifying happens…
Light is amazing. The smallest light can make a difference, even in the darkest night. Strike a match, and for that brief moment, as the flame swallows up the wood, you can see around you… What you do next determines everything. You could wait for the flames to work their way down to your fingers, blistering them and returning you back to the state of darkness you were in, or you could set something on fire, use the light to change things and eliminate the darkness for that much longer…
Darkness of the mind leads to death of the individual. The mind perceives things, but from the moment we are born, we start closing off the open mind. Cutting off the light leads to atrophy. And the light can’t be substituted for something else…
In everything, therefore, let your light shine…
The title of this post is from the Icelandic cellist Ólafur Arnalds, in the track ‘Hægt, kemur ljósið’

(or what to do with a quarter century’s worth of knowledge)
So another year has passed, and this one has not been uneventful. As has become routine, I’ll say a couple of things, sound smart, and then walk away.
Life is like a hill… The beginning is hard, where every day you see is a milestone to achieve, then slowly the climb becomes bearable… Eventually the peak is reached, the height of physical achievement, then the downhill stretch that’s either thoroughly enjoyable or absolutely terrifying happens…
Light is amazing. The smallest light can make a difference, even in the darkest night. Strike a match, and for that brief moment, as the flame swallows up the wood, you can see around you… What you do next determines everything. You could wait for the flames to work their way down to your fingers, blistering them and returning you back to the state of darkness you were in, or you could set something on fire, use the light to change things and eliminate the darkness for that much longer…
Darkness of the mind leads to death of the individual. The mind perceives things, but from the moment we are born, we start closing off the open mind. Cutting off the light leads to atrophy. And the light can’t be substituted for something else…
In everything, therefore, let your light shine…
The title of this post is from the Icelandic cellist Ólafur Arnalds, in the track ‘Hægt, kemur ljósið’

food for thought

Something I found and wanted to share…

[E]very day, we run around, ticking boxes off, making phone calls, completing errands, piling on more work on top of an already heavy load. We run around stressed, depressed, angry, impatient and unloving. We run until we can run no more, and then, we die. In between the running around, we may come, at one point or another, to face ourselves, and usually society has a nice term for this, calling it a “quarter-life” or “mid-life” crisis. It is a crisis in their eyes because they think the person is just too bogged down by all of life. And they are correct in their assertion. But what they neglect to ascertain is the fact that this person was fortunate enough to meet herself at a critical point in her life, so that she may at least give herself another opportunity to correct course, and to align her true Self with her current one.

Some people never have a crisis, and thus, never realize their true purpose. They don’t even know who they are and why they are here. And then, they die, having been highly productive all their lives, but never honestly going to the depths of their soul and becoming the person they were meant to fully be…

Read the rest here

so now

The thing with being human, having a heart, is that you end up gathering a lot of baggage on the way, trying to get over the past without making a mess of the future. I want to change the past. To go back to the forks in the road where I took the road not taken (poetry reference win) and take the road that’s taken more. Having taken a course with such promise, only to realize that I would end up doing something completely unrelated at work, having blown off a unit in school that I could have followed up on and made something of, having a bagful of what-ifs that dig deeper and deeper into my back as I carry them along, picking more along the way…
I want a time machine to go back in time with, bearing the knowledge that I have now, changing things, well aware that I will not be the same person.
I want to be free of guilt. I want a blank slate. But this slate has been painted on. Nothing can be written on without crossing lines that have been written before.
Maybe I’m just taking on more loads than I can handle. Not maybe, definitely. That’s what I’m doing.
I could just change, instead of struggling with an ever blunter pencil.
Sharpener… Nice allusion.
I sharpen my pencil and draw some more, make plans to ease myself out of the mess I have fallen into, instead of picturing how I shall fall asleep inside it and drown.
Dark imaginings.
But I have the light within myself to counter it.
Counter it I shall.

I remain skeptical

These are troubled times, if the news is to be believed. Traditional, safe systems are giving way to rapid, hard-core change. The things that were true for Generation X are not necessarily true for Generation Y. No longer will we look to the things that are and see a future beyond the next couple of days. The old rot is out, the rush of the new is in.
But are we throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Fine, Egypt and Tunisia show that there is no future in dictatorship, that people power backed by a change in how people get their information has led to a systematic enlightenment… But the key component, the people involved, would they have done what they did if they didn’t have the sophistication of social media behind them? Did the people that spearheaded the revolution and the Arab Spring know that they were just creating space for a cruel game of musical chairs?
There has been a lot of speculation that the revolutions will spread to other countries with similar situations outside the Arab world, but this is yet to happen. That said, there have been several follow-up events, like Occupy Wall Street, where protestors have occupied a park in downtown New York, in an attempt undo the system of wrongs that is the US economy…
But until I see a change that is long-term, sustainable and democratic, I remain skeptical.

do you remember the time?

This comes a while after a post about some of the things I did and believed in when I was a child.
Would you want to be a child again?
The problem with life is we all start young. So much for intelligent design. Like we work our way through it, getting more and more wisdom, some of which we could have used beforehand, but then again it’s the nature of life to save the important lessons for later.

Childhood is a generally turbulent time. there is so much to learn, so much to get right, so much that is, conversely, gotten wrong, leading to punishment, and if you’re lucky, a life lesson. Along with that, you get scars, a potent reminder of when you fell.
But you know where and when you’re going to fall. Would you do it differently? Perhaps. Then you would deny yourself some of the lessons that you learned as a result of that experience. Maybe you become a changed person, so much so that you don’t recognize yourself.
Therein lies the irony. If you could travel back in time and change yourself too much, you become someone else. If you change too little and you will suffer twice the fate.
Truth is, you are already changing your future based on what you are doing now. Forget those momentous gestures that you think will drastically change the future into some weird, wild, unrecognizable tangle of stuff… But maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Forks in the road should not leave worries about roads not taken. They lead down increasingly complex expressions of probability. They are, in a way, the first step in the journey of a thousand miles. They have their own consequences that you may not know at that moment, but when you realize what exactly is going on, it all fits…
Don’t be afraid of the future, instead work on your present. Make it the best present you can, and the future will take care of itself.

maybe, or the recovery position

Maybe the last choice you made ruined everything that you could possibly have achieved had you made a different turn.
Maybe you have an idea that you will not follow up on because it is either too massive for you to process, or too different for the world to accept. Maybe you have nobody to blame but yourself for the way your life is turning out.
Maybe you want to tell your story, but you have to fight with a million other distractions to get yourself an audience.
Maybe you want to succeed, but you want to fail even more, so that you fit in.
Maybe the turn that you took last has meant that you can’t find your way back to where you started, because that bridge you set on fire actually burned all the way through.
Maybe the walls you imagine other people have set up to close you in and stifle you are actually walls you put up for yourself.
Maybe you are unloveable, because the drugs you are on changed your personality so much that you pretty much lost your appeal.
Maybe the reason you are where you are, stuck inside something you didn’t see yourself in not too long ago is because you have all this potential you’re sitting on, but for some inexplicable reason, you chose not to exert yourself.

Well, in that case…

Get up from that mess.
Maybe you have it figured out wrong.

The exit you are afraid of? Maybe it’s the entrance to something more glorious than you could possibly imagine.
Maybe then, you will want to do something with what you have.
Maybe then, grasshopper, is when you will see that you have been in control this whole time.
Grab the steering wheel and start driving before you veer off and crash into that ditch…

life lessons from Super Mario

Thanks to Naija twitter person and all round awesome guy @maurice_nn and the perpetually lovely (and yours truly’s girlfriend) @notmutant for the general inspiration for this line of thinking…
Having been an 80s to early 90s child, there are quite a number of things I quite enjoy till now. There’s the cartoons that made sense, the fact that I could go out and play, get dirty and then go home and play video games… 8-bit video games that had random knockoff titles, like Ending Man and such, that were the cutting edge of console gaming. Cheap enough to be bought as a Christmas gift and child-silencer, expensive enough to be shown off to visiting relatives, especially cousins, they were, for lack of a better word, the ish.
And they had life lessons. Fine, you had to dig through a lot of monotonous background muzak and mock gore to get to the lessons, but they were there… Here is a random assortment from Mario. Because he’s a plumber for one, and he’s saving a princess. That’s enough backstory to keep you playing for days on end.

1. Always try to jump over obstacles
There’s blocks, pipes, random spaces in the ground and other things in the way. You could sit there and wait for the time to run out, or you could jump over the obstacle. Sometimes there’s a spring, sometimes there isn’t. Just jump and get over it.

2. Deal with disappointment
Sometimes the princess is just in another castle. Not much you can do about that, save for move on to the next level and continue with the fight…

3. Money will make your life better…
The more the coins you collect, the closer you get to an extra life. More money, less problems. Suck on that, Diddy.

4. Empty space is not always ‘empty’
Empty spaces have stars, for immunity, 1UPs, steps to other levels and other such interesting secrets… Blank walls are often hiding interesting secrets…
Exploring your surroundings will help expand your horizons.

5. Mushrooms are good for you
They make you big and strong… And you can destroy bricks and such. Plus they also come bearing extra lives…

6. You can always start over
No matter how well (or badly) you did the last time, once you get bitten by the vicious plant thing, or an owl, or the turtle, or you get flamed by the dragon, you can always start over.

7. No matter how small you are, you can still jump and get yourself some coins
Even when Mario is a wee little plumber, there’s still some coins he can get. Don’t let your size limit you…

8. Confront your fears. They’ll still be there if you run away
Sometimes the only way to get through to the next level is to attack that Bowser. He’ll still be there when you’re at the end of the level…

9. Use your head
It’s the only way to get coins and power-ups…

10. Keep your eyes on the prize
In the end, the aim is to save the princess. The money and the power are nice, but they’re just there to help you get to the end…

Alright, so these lessons may be inadvertent at best, but they’re a measure of life’s random inadvertent lessons. A plumber with a thing for mushrooms on a quest to save a princess goes level after level, braving lava, water, flying fish, owl creatures, turtles, some boss called Bowser and other such randomness.
That in itself is why Mario is a thousand different kinds of #winning.

why i write

After attending the [first ever] Poets and Writers Online Meetup at the iHub, and reading (and re-reading) George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write‘, I have been looking back at my reasons for starting a blog in the first place, why I write and where I want this to go.
It’s physically exhausting, sitting and channeling the thoughts in my brain into words on the scree, but it is immensely satisfying as well, having a conversation with the world, being open to ideas and suggestions and having a jolly good time. I believe in the power of the written word, that the things we put down are magic, a representation of what we have hidden in the recesses of our minds. Being a writer of any class, from a two-bit nobody such as myself to a veritable internet phenomenon means that there is something I am doing, something they are doing, sharing the written word in all its complexities and sculpting beauty from what they do. Reaching within themselves and weaving their thoughts on the loom of syntax and semantics to produce a cloth so fine and so beautiful that the most we can do is admire it, cut it to size and wear it proudly.
Then there are those who take the cloth woven from the artist and fashion a gag from it, use it to stifle the artist, to fashion a crude noose from which the artist will hang, taking his word with him. The ultimate sacrifice, after all, is to give your life for your art.
That is why I write.
I write because I have something to say. Because I have opinions. Because I want to share my viewpoint with the rest of the world.
I write especially because I know there will be a time when I will be so jaded, so lost to the world that I will not have anything to say. I write because I know my hopes will be crushed, my faith will be tested. I write because I will want to look back and remind myself who I really am.
I write to remember.
I write, because the words in my head form a portal to my heart, to what I really feel but I am afraid to say.
I write, therefore I am.

date a girl who writes

This is not an original post, it is a composite of various posts I found on the internet, titled ‘Date a Girl Who Writes’.

Date a girl who writes. She’ll grab her pen from time to time and write about her man. She’ll work on prose and poetry that will and won’t rhyme. She’ll feed you similes for breakfast and perhaps, metaphors for lunch. Your meals shall be filled with figures of speech-others will not care about.

She’s the one with a journal in her hand, a notebook in her purse, scrap paper in her car, and pencils in her back pocket. She’s always scribbling something, praying it won’t evaporate before she gets it down onto paper. Because she’s always scribbling, she’s always looking down, and that’s why you never noticed her before.

The girl who writes will speak to you and make fuss about details- even the minute ones, the slightest, the tiniest blink of your eye. She’ll make vivid descriptions about many things and you’ll wince at.

Date a girl who writes. She will turn you into an anthology. You’ll open her notebook and there will be anatomy, physiology -every bit, every fiber, every word dedicated to you or everybody.

Date a girl who writes, for she will not only be your external hard drive, she will be the memory holder of the things you will lose and love. She will be a reminder of the times – the moments you will unconsciously leave behind.

Talk to her like any normal person would do. Ask her about her interests. See if she’s interested to respond to whatever comes out of your mouth. She’d be busy thinking at times though, about her next story, a topic, a blog post. A lot of things just pop out inside her mind like popcorn, but just go talk to her. Sooner or later, she’d realized that somebody is willing to listen to her chatter.

Ask her out on a date, because she knows what it means to fall in love, take risks, and get hurt. She knows how it feels, or at least how to fake it. She had been used to twists and turns –they’re already part and parcel of her system. The girl who writes has already been tested by time for she’d been slaying dragons and fighting in wars in her stories, together with the main character and everyone of the cast in the story. Date her for she had been the captain of a ship, the queen of her own castle, the pianist of her own concerto. She knows for it is through writing that she could express what she truly feels. She knows, because it is through writing that she breathes and lives. Just take her anywhere. She’d see the good and bad side of things; she’s already used to them.

Try to understand her actions a few months later. She’s only concerned with how to change the story’s flow, how to surprise you as the story goes, and how to make magic out of mere words. The pen is her wand; it is through which that she gains access through her mind’s eye. Emotions are her vocabulary. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are her helpers. The girl who writes knows how to command them to do things, the way a hunter catches his prey. Stories and essays are her spells. She is literature’s fairy godmother. You, the man who reads, are her secret prince. Try to understand her as she lives on her ordinary life. Try to fathom all her words because she means it, but never get tired of reading her mind. Appreciate her passion. She knows how to please you through her words.

Give her time to pause, for she knows it’s the best for the both of you. The girl who writes knows where to insert the climax and where to put transitions. She knows how to iron things out. She knows when it doesn’t sound right, or if it would, how to make it better. Her sentences might “run on and on”, but never get tired of chasing her. She loves it when you brood over what she has written. She might not be an expert when it comes to syntax, but she knows how she’d deal her thoughts. Let her write, let her move.

She’s just the girl who reads and the girl who doesn’t rolled into one person, and that somebody in between. She’s just a girl.

Date a girl who writes for she knows how to begin and end your love story. She had it all outlined in one of her sacred notepads, tucked within the deepest recesses of her bag each day. She still doesn’t know what the ending would be, however, for like a pen she’s just an instrument, guided by the power of a story left untold. It’s up to you both on how the story would go: you, the man who reads and her, the girl who writes. But most certainly, it would be another happily-ever-after.

You’ll be annoyed at her musings and get fed up of her rants. She’ll speak of other writers – the language of Shakespeare, the imagination of Tolkien and how she wishes to rewrite Nabokov. You’ll meet Huxley, Tennyson, Hugo, but only through her stories. She will talk of her fictional crushes and you’ll shrink and shrink. She’ll be your grammar police and you will not like it. She’ll charge you with the violation of rules you didn’t know that exists.

But still, date a girl who writes for you’ll find consolation in her words. You’ll find comfort in her cradle of thoughts and you’ll find understanding in her grief. Date a girl who writes for she’ll write to you while waiting.

She’ll start with “I am writing this letter to you while you’re off buying drinks. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever written a letter to somebody sitting next to me on a bench, but I feel it’s the only way I can get through to you”, like Midori from Norwegian Wood.

Love a girl who writes. Despite the flaws of her own handwriting or her manipulation over words, she knows where to begin and when to end. She understands that there is neither good nor bad timing; we actually create our own chances. Adore her story and inspire her to write more.

Date a girl who reads and writes. You must know that she’ll appreciate more if you read too or an expert in making a classic brewed. She knows that taking time is like reading a 10-chapter book. Every chapter is another mystery. Don’t rush her on things. Like a story, it needs time and way a heck lot of effort to make it ripe. She doesn’t want half-baked plots neither rushed proposals. Listen to her when she talks about a bad ending. It’s her way of saying that she could do better than that. Randomly give her flowers or her favorite author at any given day. Small surprises make her experience that fairy tale can actually happen in real life. It’s easy to love this girl. Drop her small notes, spoil her with poetry and love letters. Her deepest joys come from someone who knows how to make her feel magical, fragile, vulnerable and romantically insane within. Find someone who writes. Check the back of her notebook for some simple passages during one of those slow days. She’s the writer. She knows that writing is her way of drawing strength from her inner self. Someone who knows what she wants. This girl will write the story of your lives and make you feel that the world is more than what you thought it was. She’ll take you to an adventure of a lifetime with your kids inspired by Dr Seuss or The Adventures of Alice.

If you find this girl, never let her go.

Better yet, marry her.