A WORLD OF CHOICES

Every moment of life is a blessing. Is it? Sometimes things are really good and in those times we are all the things we wish to be and yet other times, not so good and we are worse than grumpy Charly, Femi or Chinedu. Ultimately Life is life. Life is made up of choices, constant choices. When to eat, when to drink, what to eat, what to do… the list is limitless. It is almost insanity to think of all the people that have walked the earth from the very first man on earth; the very first being which we all have come to agree upon as Adam (in His various forms and cultural elements). But this too is a fact: there was a first man. When we are born, we are oblivious of the world we are about to inherit, everything is so simple. Suddenly it no longer is and everything comes at you at such a rush: go to school, learn the language, help at home with chores, make friends, learn diplomacy, human relations and take advantage of opportunities, feed the dogs, mow the yard, milk the cows, tend the garden, talk to girls, talk to boys, become man, become woman, lead a home, lead a group, join a group, speak your mind. Speak?!

To speak is to make audible compositions of words first formed in our thoughts as a channel of communication from one person to another or to oneself. Life is full of many speaking because life is full of many conversations. The world has gone to war within itself for many years due to many wrong speaking and other times too many right ones. Everyone has an opinion. 

Thoughts: What are thoughts? Thoughts are ramblings of many words yet unspoken. Sometimes we think we know who and what we are, other times we have not even a single clue. Why do men die? Apart from all the guaranteed answers based on faith, the question of why Man dies and what happens after we die cannot be answered with a fact based theory. Yet we are alive, so what are we? We chase after things we do not want or understand why we do, simply because we are born into it. What value does a shiny piece of metal hold in the actual value of human existence? Can Metal feed you or sustain life? Yet it is more valuable than the food and water that keeps us alive.

Our world is full and constantly evolving and yet we cannot fully understand even the simplest part of it; ourselves. The world we live in is not very direct: It is a world of chaos, a world of peace, a world of joy, a world of trials, a world of tribulations, a world of pain, a world of wealth and riches, a world of poverty and sadness, a world of culture, a world of family, sickness, loneliness and friendship. It is a world that is complicated with things that we cannot yet understand. Although many books have been written, many journals have been kept, many men and women have lived lives and have said wise things; this world yet cannot be understood. The world we live in is full of choices but yet not based on choices. We have learnt to live based on what we have been told by those who have lived and come before us and to a large extent, this has determined the direction of our evolution as mankind. I wonder, if Einstein had not discovered the theory of relativity and newton, the laws of motion, would we have those advancements today? Would we not still be stuck in a much older age? As a side comment, the under development of parts of Africa, parts of Europe and parts of the world is quite astonishing. To think that two children in different parts of the world, born on the same day, on the same planet, drinking the same water and breathing in the same air can have two very different lives. To think that race is something that is still so misunderstood because we are all different? To think that a European child is raised to believe that an African child is much less both intellectually and humanly speaking! So if you were to take a pause and just think about that for a little while; this is an actual theory that has been published in a number of articles, websites and journals and research is still on-going as to whether within the human race there is dominance and class separation which we have seen throughout history from apartheid to the holocaust. What do you choose to believe about your life? What do you believe about your humanity? And is belief really strong enough to change who you are? Sometimes we like to imagine or re-imagine the world as we see it but does that change what the world really is? Take for example, how things swing from one style of life to another, constantly evolving, with almost everyone following suit. Once it was the time of the employees when everyone wanted to get a job so they go to school, get a good certificate, get a steady paying job, get paid and raise a family. Then that moved beyond that phase to a time when everyone now wants to run a business and have some stake in their future even though there really is no future to be had, just life. In the same way, either I am right or wrong, it does not matter just as in the same way, whatever choice you make, certain things are guaranteed to happen. If you choose, for example, to set your life up in a distant land, moving somewhere from Africa to somewhere like America or the United Kingdom, say England, which most Africans dream to do, the first thing you have done is rid Africa of your potential and given that potential to another part of the world. Now, it does not matter if you are valued or not, what matters is you have made a choice; a choice that at first glance does not seem to hurt anyone but hurts everyone because an African is an African. The world would be a better place if a human being was simply just a human being regardless of where he went, how he spoke, the colour of his skin, the type of his hair, to be seen as a human being and given  the respect that each human deserves from his or her own contemporary; human. But we do not see that at all, worst of all is the darker races and this is not a pointing of fingers but a fact and the answer is really simple, Africans have Africa to make beautiful, to make strong, to make independent and deserving of respect because the world we live in is not just a world of choices, it is a world of principles. One of these principles is that the strong will always prey on the weak so that begs the first question, is Africa weak?

While you read this, I hope that you think a little bit more about life and your life and what it ultimately means to be alive. A lot of people die every second all over the world; just let that sink in for a bit. This very moment, as you read this, a number of people just died and yet here you are, reading. The world we live in is a world of choices but choices to which we have no control. You cannot choose where you are born, you cannot choose to whom you will be born to, you cannot choose where you will live at least for the very first years of your life and you cannot choose how you die. Within those dimensions you have choices, yes. You can choose when you travel, what time you eat, when you go to bed and these choices sometimes are rigged against your favour, then you do not really have a choice; then the world opens up and you begin to have newer choices again. So what can you do? What to do is pretty direct: You Live! To live is to experience life. It is to decide who you are, why you are, what you are, for what you are and to be rooted in that identity. What I am telling you might seem to contradict things here and there, things like religious beliefs, spiritual; understandings, psychological analysis and theories upon theories upon theories but the underlying principle of it all is this, all we do not know is what we do not know and what we know, we understand. We know when we are hungry; we know when we are not. We understand that when we get hungry, if we would eat we will be filled. We do not know why people die at least not from the perspective of human life, we do not even know what happens to them when they die; we cannot! Not in this life and not while we are alive. It has been proven that until something is tested and true, for us it does not exist. To have spiritual or religious beliefs is something else entirely, which is also part of the human experience even to those who claim not to believe in such things but it is something else entirely from the purpose of this write.

So as you live your life, look at the choices before you and be aware! Be aware of what you do, be aware of why. Because when you know, then you would walk without fear, you would love and you would have light without darkness.