Rice, Rat and Roach
On the Wood and Lizard that Determine Life
Hello, welcome to this week's edition of the Nascent Newsletter, it’s a Friday, September 16, 2022. Dear, how are you doing? How’s life, how’s your mental health, with over 60 million people in Nigeria currently battling mental illness, it’s safe to check in on one another. It’s okay to habitually call away your mind from everything and everyone damaging. The mind is always the place to damage so protect it.
I wrote this Week's Nascent Newsletter listening to Paulson Kalu's Ụwa Zuru Onye. Cast in the mold of the likes of Fela, Oliver, Rex, Osita, Mike, etc, whose art imbued with age-old wisdom and philosophies that interrogate life, Paulson's Ụwa Zuru Onye song lends itself to the thesis of today's newsletter.
On the days that I feel more useful than is normal, I turn to the world, and very often, it’s not social media, it’s the Radio. I love listening to the Radio in the way the Toby’s of this age love to podcast. It’s bewildering.
Strolling home squeezing a parcel, in it three balls of Akara and a mold of pap, the size of a two-month-old fist, this evening, I recalled the imploring eyes of the young girl on Facebook today, who aware of the cheated air hanging about her surname, risked her chance to beg for a kidney donor.
Photo by nairametrics.com
How tricky, isn’t life a spoon, as they say? The jam the Ekweremadu's are in at the moment leaves so much for sharing. Is life as unfair as we say? Or it’s our greed asking for more? I attempted an answer myself. I tried.
Munching the last ball of my Akara, and looking over my balcony, I noticed that a shrub near the packed SUV of my caretaker, didn’t get as much rain as the car, and other plants much taller- all of them nestled close to the tyre. It had rained. The car floundered in the chutes of the showers, only a squirt stroked the plant.
Observing the plant's revolt in the after-the-rain cool wind, that wafted through the compound, I understood the dynamics of life, at least I tried. Sometimes in life, the well-off are not so better off. Imagine if you had it all BUT forever bequeathed with a generational ailment like kidney disease, and your life be called away by health anytime? Like the plant in my story, the rain and wind the heavens send are as sufficient for both the plant and the SUB to the extent that they need to sustain life.
The plant can grow up. In fact, it should aspire to be at the top like everyone else. But, the idea should not be to overtake the SUV, to wrestle the limelight, often such rivalry stresses a lack of understanding of life.
Equally important for the plant, it’s the understanding that in enjoying the spotlight the SUV has had to weather much more storms. Life is for all of us, like that. Those we finalize are more fortunate than others or even ourselves pay in more ways than one. All the money in the world, could not buy Ekweremadu's girl a fitting kidney to continue her best 25-year-old life in Newcastle, why?
Dear Nascentite, today’s newsletter is not making a case for complacency, or romance with poverty, penury, and trenches. Or is it an attempt to make a useless conversation with the misfortune of others? Far from that.
Life is fair and gives to all according to their capacity to deal, endure, and use. Yes! The plant and SUV in my story receive from life, albeit in varying degrees. Can the plant aspire to the top? Is the SUV stopping it? Is it all rosy for the SUV? Should the plant make it a life goal to oust the SUV, covet what it has, and be what it is? You tell me.
As you lay down to rest, remember, that life goals are as multifaceted as human experiences. People are as free as air to aspire to any height. But, thing is, having too much does not equal battling baby demons. Neither does having little mean more grown-up angels. Everyone has their demon designate- rich and not-rich. It's sheer folly to strive to covet the other’s blessings and decline the curses.
In the end, the goal (read my goal) should be to have enough to meet ALL needs wherever and however sparse or abundant life supplies.
Till I write you soon,
Stay the same.