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.

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.

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.

on the last day of a generally eventful trip round the sun

One of the things my experience with life does is it makes me afraid of the future. Obsessing over what might be, what might happen. Most of the time I end up picking on the negative and magnifying it so that in the end my future looks like doomsday. Instead of being content with whatever I have, I obsess about what I don’t have, what I could have gotten and in the end I feel like a loser. So in the end I have all this fear of the future, like there’s nothing I can do to change it. That is, simply put, fear of novelty, fear of newness, fear of the future. For most people, the future is something to look forward to. Something to be all excited and happy about. At least they have something to look forward to. I’m not one of those people. I shrink at the hint of me tomorrow. I see failure, and in this I’m afraid to do anything that would improve my future. I go, “after all, it’s not like I have something to look forward to”. Obsession is unhealthy. Something that’s completely destructive. Damaging both to the body and the mind. But it happens so often and so regularly that it’s considered normal. With time, it becomes normal, it even becomes the thing that we do. Obsess. Over trivial things. Like clothes, looks, the opinions of others… Things that we otherwise wouldn’t care about given a choice. Like I don’t care what clothes I’m wearing or what the make of my phone is until I see something I perceive as better. That’s when the mind goes into overdrive and questions like why I’m not like that person, why I don’t have what he has and what I should do to become like that person become the focus of your thoughts, your actions. TV The lack of an opposing force makes it worse. It’s a career for some, advertising and induced peer pressure. To be perfectly honest, it involves thoughts of death and destruction of the person that is me, the individual, for the will of the world to be done. I wanted to be like other people. I hated me. I didn’t want to be me. I hated me. I’d imagine the world just moving on over my dead body, like the cog in the wheel, whose presence isn’t as important, because what’s one cog in an engine with six billion gears? I felt inconsequential. And this would get me angry and depressed. Hating the world and blaming it for what I thought it had made me. Turns out that that was one of the many things I had become obsessed with. Making the world “feel” me and who I was. But one thing I realized was that that was what I wanted me to believe. That the world was so bad that the only escape was to build an internal world. A place where I would be safe from other people. I wished I had an alternate that I could become whenever I wanted. Switching when the circumstances changed. In effect I became a me person. With the burden of all this I slowly cracked and obsessed about a future after a complete meltdown. With the world having deserted me, all that was left was for me to desert myself and whatever I decided would be the eventual outcome of my life. But I didn’t. I left the world to its devices and set to fixing myself. Becoming a person. Becoming real. All this time I was just toying with myself, moaning at failures, not realizing that eventually I had to come out of all that nonsense and define who I would be. So I set out to become who I wanted to be. No illusions, no ideas, no voices. Just me. And I set out to make my life something I would be proud of, not regret. I cut out all that thinking and set to getting things to do. That’s why I listen to so much music nowadays. And good music. And reading. I do read a lot now. Gives me things to think about.
I turn 24 tomorrow.
The world is still the same place, I have to grow within it.
It will change for me, not the other way round.
I will prevail.

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?

here be dragons

Life has a lot of grey areas, areas that lie uncharted that in maps of old would be marked as ‘Here be Dragons’… There’s a tendency for such places to be the source of a rather bizarre fear, effectively a fear of the unknown. Instead of going there and finding out what exactly is over there that’s such a mystery, the mapmaker just throws his own story there and that’s that…

Life’s like that sometimes. It’s a giant experiment that’s got a million ingredients and a billion outcomes, like somewhere along the way, the actions of your past influence your present and go on to tweak your future ever so slightly… The thing with decisions like that is they look so small in the moment, but they snowball and become an avalanche later in life.
So then the question begs, is it wiser to sit put and point at the dragons on the map or go gung ho and find out if the dragons are for real?
Sometimes the unknown is better than what is known, for the obvious reason that out of sight is out of mind. I mean, it’s easier to attack something from a point of ignorance than from a point of knowledge. Take away the ignorance and you end up with a changed mind. That’s why ignorance ranks up there amongst mankind’s worst enemies. Fear and ignorance, coupled with a blind faith, taking things for their surface value.
Dragons can be substituted for pretty much anything… Emotions, ‘stuff’, life itself, things that are generally frightening and therefore have loads of associated pain that they carry along. Then in the end, in true dragon fashion, the bearer gets burned. Badly. They also have to make sacrifices to keep the dragon quiet and sated. All this would have been much easier had the dragons been vanquished in the first place… But slowly by slowly, the unknown grows and covers everything like a thin fog, making that which had been known before to be confused, muddled up…
And unlike the story, St. George does not make a quick appearance and kill the beast. But this one grows and grows until it swallows you whole…
Somewhere along the way, that space has to be defined, then the dragons vanquished and you reign victorious.
Or you lose.

pie in the sky

One of my favourite episodes of the [sadly short-lived] Evil Con Carne, spinoff from Grim and Evil, is ‘The Pie Who Loved Me’, where blueberry pie made by Doctor Ghastly (whose favourite element is Boron, plus she’s got some rocking red knee-high boots on…) that works for Hector Con Carne, that ends up wrecking the world.
Everyone holds hands in the end and talks about how the all-conquering pie has broken their spirits, and the mystery ingredient that’s got the whole world subdued (after having too much pie nonetheless) is love…
Apparently pie in the sky, outside the cartoon context) is an allusion to heaven, like we all want a piece of the pie in the sky. he promise of something greater, like the assurance that all that life is is not going to end here…
So in the end it’s an attempt to get a piece of the pie, like one piece is not enough. And like everything else, there’s a teeny bit of envy that works itself in, like I’m happy to get my bit of pie, knowing someone somewhere will get a smaller piece. that way I can feel better about mine.
There’s no point in me saying I have eternal life (or whatever alternative there is in all the other religions) when there’s someone somewhere that’s going without. It would be a major fail on my part as a member of the human race. My brother’s keeper.
So I shouldn’t just focus on getting as much pie as I can, I should make sure that in getting my pie, nobody will get any less of theirs… Being considerate is hard…
And the pie? Well, the pie is love. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

Deux Milles Neuf

The end of a year, and the (supposed) end of a decade…
It has had its fair share of ups and downs, this year. And thankfully it’s been more up than down.
It has been the year of responsibilities stumbled upon, relationships consolidated, the blog, the internship (with the awesome sandwiches), the ulcer, the failure, the identity carved out, the new laptop, the .1 child (*wink* at @sweetestshaboo), the criminal record, the broken phone, tech support, TWITTER!!! (including the super awesome tweeps, mnajijua), the drought, the rain, Hurricane Wanjiku, Zain and free calls, the census, Coast twice in one year, AIESEC, hashtags, road trips, respect… I could go on and on…
It has been a good year.
All indicators are that 2010 will be teh awesome.
Happy new year, world.

Post-holiday Clarity

I had been on holiday for about 5 days somewhere between end of November and beginning of December, and during that time I had loads of time to think. Beach-walking, introspective thinking, that stuff.
So here’s what I have drawn from that.
My life is a massive spiderweb. In it are tangled very many individuals and things that either have an impact on me or that I have an impact on…
And usually what happens is these webs is that the impact of such people is soon forgotten, until, say, major crisis happens and there is a recollection. Or the disappeared person reappears and there is a recollection. Like a primary school buddy suddenly happens to be in the same school as me, and all the recollection about how we were the fiercest of rivals comes up… then I realize I kinda took my foot off the gas after that pressure was eased…
In my life I’ve had various pressures to succeed, some of which persist, others which wear off. With time I get used to the persistent pressures and just tune them out… But then they kick it up a notch and I end up beating myself up for generally sucking at something i should be good at.

I thought I had myself figured out at 19… The world was there for me to take over and completely pwn, but with time I realized there was way more than I could manage by myself. I’d always been the independent rebel-sans-cause type, the world couldgo hang for all I cared, but that came to change as well, having to factor in other people into my life and live with them and for them as it were… Not exactly the idal situatiom, but that’s how we’re programmed, to be social and everything…
So here we are, having barely lived our lives. What’s it to be? For one, I need to learn to stop taking things so seriously. It’s only life. And much as I have come to learn to live from regret to regret, there’s also the happy bits in between…I need to take those and learn from them. I also need to start working out how to move on to level 2. And to make use of what I have. And before that, to appreciate what I have.

Above all, I need to learn how to speak my truth.

Proximity vs Distance

So my roommate and his girlfriend have been going through some rather interesting phases of late, like they’ve broken up and made up several times. Yesterday was the calling-and-no-answering stage, and before that was the disowning of everything. Now my room is rather small, so I have become an unfortunate participant in these sharings, including being asked over and over again by roommate what roommate’s girlfriend’s texts mean. And they were rather cryptic. So basically it was me agreeing to whatever he said to get him off my case…
They seemed to be outdoing themselves in an attempt to prove that familiarity breeds contempt.
But no, now they’re back together.
So that got me thinking, is it a thing about familiarity, through proximity, that wears people down and makes relationships so weird?
Long distance relationships have the added strain of having to compensate for the physical closeness with other things, like communication. So i have the opposite problem… Miss Girl has been away for a while, and in the meantime I have sucked majorly at my attempts at communication with her.
Proximity makes everything trivial, like too much contact and such. And distance makes a difference. Bring in a relationship with someone you can’t see/be with is hard.
Somewhere along the great slide rule of life, a compromise has to be struck…