By Kodwo BRUMPON
“You can learn wisdom at your grandfather’s feet, or at the end of a stick.” – Zulu proverb
We all work, because it is part of the rhythm of living. It is so important it determines what our activism is, and allows our being to stand out. Contrary to what many assume, work is not a means to an end, it is what makes our lives meaningful. What we need to ask ourselves is whether we are working at healing a broken society or we are simply working in a broken society?
Your answer to this rationalistion determines what road of activism you take in this New Year. Ideally, it is better to work at the broken society. This is because a thriving society means a higher quality of life for you and for all others.
To work at a broken society means to work at creating systems to cater for the good in every aspect of our lives. Not only would we enjoy our work, but our experiences of life would be better and meaningful.
Are you one of those individuals who have assumed that you can find fulfilment in something else other than your work? Well, you need to understand that you will spend almost all your adult life working.
So, what other ways can you find fulfilment if not in your work? That is why religion teaches that when you work; work as if you are working for God. This is because the kind of work we all do and the way we work affects not only our society, but His creation. Our works continues His creation by creating the societies we live in. And it is our works that can re-create our society into the ideal we all envisage.
This idealism is only possible if we will consciously take stock of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of our works, examining their pasts and its parts. That should be our resolution for this New Year. We should be renewing our works and the ways we work. It should be our approach from henceforth. For no matter how deep we burrow into the earth, we can never avoid the fact that we are responsible for the present state of our society.
It may sound a little awkward accepting that our works and the way we have carried them have contributed to our present state. It is to say that we are the way we are because of the way we have acted. Interestingly, such is the reality. But more importantly, it is this awkwardness that can jolt us out of our comfort zone. We need to appreciate that a reassessment is always necessary for a renewal.
Without it, we will just doom ourselves to carving a path to nowhere. We will not only repeat the mistakes of old, but we might end up where we started and in a worse state. When we embrace out awkwardness, work will no longer be a convenience means to an end, it will become the means of our being. It will become the distinctive language of our belief and we would put in more than what we do now.
Often times, articles and write-ups about how deplorable our society is, go viral on social media. We are quick to share them as if some other people were responsible for our cancer. What we miss is what those messages point out to us, that we are responsible for ourselves.
And in most cases, we also miss out on what it demands of us; that we change our own selves from the inside out. We are comfortable reading them and passing them along and do nothing about ourselves.
It is good to share, but it is better to work on yourself when those write-ups awaken in you, a need for change. As the saying goes, “be the change you want to see.” If you want to experience a wonderful life, you have got to start with yourself.
It is the same with work. We need to renew the way we work for work forms an integral part of who we are. We need to nourish ourselves with grand and austere ideas of what is beautiful for our society so that it will feed into what we do as work and the way we work.
Your work is a gift to our humanity. So, ask yourself, the kind of gift you are presenting to humanity. Would you be happy if posterity paid you back in the light? If your answer is in the negative, then you need to make a change. The time to renew our works is now. We can no longer wait. Many of us assume that when we are not moving forward, then we are marking time on the spot.
That is an erroneous impression of life. Nothing is ever the same because nothing is ever still. Life is always on the move; it is in a perpetual motion. When you stand still, everything behind you rushes past you. Technically, that means, you fall behind every time you stop. Thus, if your pause is not strategic, you will start from a distance behind where you first stopped. That is why the renewal must happen now and here.
There is nothing more fulfilling than doing that which gives your heart joy and your soul peace. You cannot achieve that by not caring about the way you work. You must try to work in a more purposeful way to renew our society.
That is one of the ways in which you and the people around would feel that we are indeed, in a New Year. Otherwise, the days would continue to be as mundane as the way you were working in the previous years. The opportunity this New Year presents is for us to renew the world. Let us start by renewing the way we work…
__________________________________________________________________
Kodwo Brumpon is an executive coach at Polygon Oval, a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics, with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses to help them cultivate synergies, that catapults into their strategic growth, and certifies their sustainability.
Comments, suggestions, and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at [email protected]
