LIFE TEACHINGS

It had started slowly and unexpectedly. Then fast and uncontrollably. Like the roller-coaster. Like the falling of dominoes. Unexpectedly, fast and curdling. And unfortunate. Because it was his life, and life was proving economical with goodness. It refused him to brandish his smile.

He sat in the room alone. His hands stretched on the desk. A very serious young man. It takes a lot of courage to face the future without security of any sort. And most of the times, his courage failed him. At such time he forgot life was a gay and glorious adventure. You needed a free heart, and clean life.

But you cant be free without security. You cant think, you cant focus, you cant make decisions with a chaotic brain to nurse. It was not that simple. Bludgeoning of almost all his family members to a pulp was still a sore. And other incidences before. So it was impossible to be free. It made him think of many, many possibilities in life, when he should have been thinking of something else.

Therefore he was unhappy.

Insecurity implies uncertainty. Even risks have certainties. Inability to convert uncertainties, in stark reality, is a very scary incidence. Therefore he was scared. He had come to accept that he could never fit in the life he had once been. He could hear laughter outside. A lady laughing. Life was going on around him just the same.

Untroubled, uninterrupted.

Of course life continued. The sun rose, and the warmed-over cadavers would uncoil from sleep and the anodyne of inhibited sex, giving themselves over to the frustration and hunger and disillusionment and emptiness and panic and despoliation and decrepitude and deception of another day.

                                                            I am not SCREAMING!!!!

He refused to think of other things. Like the dizzying greediness by MPs, like the death-inducing pot-holed roads, the sickening bursting sewers, ineffective police force with inability to calmly place their oiled AK’s muzzles in the asses and blowing themselves to smithereens. He refused to think about the grand corruption, the Ocampo Six and the death of Mercy Chepkosgei Keino under an influential politician . His derailed brain could only accommodate that which troubled him most.

In his wildest moments of thinking, when he would become fervent to the point of hilarity, he would talk to God. God was a deity, and he appreciated that. He had been brought up in a strict Christianity background, and had learnt fast, that without his presence, he could have withered ugly-ly. The Book of Job was his favorite, and he could recite it verse by verse.

Lord, he would say, I want to be the gayest, maddest nigga in the world. I want it as much as the next fellow. To be spontaneous as the green idea of growth. And to know goodness as the tree is glad of the burden of its bearing. Knowing that at last there are know exclusive persons and no such things as special privileges for anyone. Neither here nor thereafter…

He would let go of everything. He would loose the knot in his heart, the enigma, the paradox, the irritation and the attitude. After prayers he would relax. And hope. Hope was the only thing he was left with. Hope that prayers changes things.

But in his situation, alas, lies a moated-tower of mediocrity, close to unassailable, and it holds such sway, it has acquired such a body of mediocre opinion about it that it is useless to try and make a dent in its smugness, and its exclusiveness, and its indifference to anything that does not come entirely with its limited scope and compass and influence.

That situation is called life.