“If you enjoy jumping, you catch up with the nimble.” – Akan proverb
How we describe ourselves to ourselves is how we see life. My heart drops to a low point every time I hear my fellow countrymen describe themselves with phrases like “we can’t;” “it’s not possible;” etc. We are so negative; we have made the devil redundant. Our negativity has degraded us to the point where we settle for anything. Honestly, we have no pride about ourselves, and the things that make us. And the worst part is many amongst us believe we can never, ever change ourselves, much more the world around us. Does it not baffle your intellect that the population agree that politicians on both sides of the divide are playing us, and instead of kicking them out, we sigh, drop our shoulders and lament that we have no other choice. Are we sure we do not have a choice or we are so narrow-minded we will prefer to suffer? Where this myopic perception originated from is the last thing we should probably discuss.
Nevertheless, we need to make it known that we deceive ourselves if we say we can never change. For too long, we have deceived ourselves about who we are; what we can do, how we can do them; when we have to do it; and whether we even have to do it at all. And we know on some elemental level that such deceptive thinking will never get us anywhere. Yet we somehow let ourselves forget it and continue basking in our mediocrity and foolhardiness. We seem to remember when tragedy strikes and then suddenly we are all emotional about why we can do better and should actually do better. In that vulnerable state, we grow wiser above our intellectual insights and we become fully aware of what we should have done long ago.
This monkey business of swinging between unhappiness and idiocy has to stop. For that to happen, we have to overcome the narrow-mindedness that fuels our negativity. Its deadening effect is destroying our society. In all honesty, it has shaped us into a mindless force, causing us to glide through life like zombies, with the objective of satisfying only our cravings. Have you ever wondered why experts and everyday people alike agree that we are sitting on gold, and yet our society is being strangled by poverty? And have you asked yourself in what ways you have contributed to this stagnating attitude. Our attitude has spanned our fate, and in this case it has become our greatest source of unhappiness.
The familiarity between us and everything that matters has to he pulled down. It has dulled our appreciative senses. When was the last time you watched a sunset? When was the last time you had a conversation with a child of another parent? Attitude is a paradoxical concept, but it plays a sovereign role in the quality of our lives. Thus, we could improve ourselves quite well when we make a conscious effort to positively change our attitudes. We have to cultivate an excitement about life; about the little and simple things. We need to re-engineer our attitudes to visualise each new day with newness and with grateful sensitivity. We are humans, not robots. We have not been programmed to behave only in a particular way. And we are not addicts, fame and power should not be the only stimulants that should drive us to work.
It is time to restore the glory of our race. It is time to unearth and correct the misconceptions and self-deceptions disfiguring our glory. It will come at a price for many have hinged their fortunes on our woes and would resist with all their might, the mortification of our attitudes. They will engage us in endless debates about what view of ourselves we should adopt; and question which stories about our heritage are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions; and they will come up with many tools and discordant voices, all in the name of slowing down the rotations of the revolution. But we should let posterity inspire our strive and address our challenges with the energy of the sun.
Let us strip ourselves of our narrow-mindedness so that the dreams of hope can become a reality. Let us describe ourselves as fabulous and compassionate and elegant for this whole life is nothing but an appreciation of all of creation, and a bit of merry-making to celebrate the efforts we put into preserving the beauty that was handed to us, no matter the alterations that the forces of nature may hammer into it. Our call to dominate the earth is so that we can shape tomorrow and the future after it to resemble the paradise we dream on living in, after we have passed onto the next life. That is why we can no longer afford to myopic about life and its opportunities. Let us brave the odds and create a new meaning, so that we can believe again…
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