… and it looks like it is designed to be so. Life, growth, progress can be a real hard trudge. One thing that always baffles me is why the process of growth is so painful for children. They are innocent, yet they have to go through it. As a mum, this breaks my heart into tiny pieces watching the pain they have to go through to grow, the pain of walking, being toilet trained, weaning off the pacifier, learning to eat, be socially right, teething etc. Teething is always the big one for me, the pain, the fever, sleeplessness for the child and everyone. I always wonder, why can’t the ‘thing’ just come out without all the drama? Or better still, why don’t we just pop out with some of these things already in place? at least we come out with some bits already there! I don’t have an answer to this question, but I know that pain is part of the process. Children, robust as they are, go through the process, survive it and usually get on with life. The point is that they have no say in the matter.

With adults, it can be slightly different, we usually (not always) have a say in our growth process. Our pain tolerance or willingness to accept pain has a part to play. Generally I am not a big fan of pain. I love a pain free, stress free, peaceful, calm existence. That will be my preference any time T. For example, I hate needles, any type, be it taking blood or injection, I am always in a state of dread about it. I am told it is just a quick sharp scratch and it is over and usually that is the case, with the exception of when they can never find my ever elusive veins. So it is a small ‘ouch’ and job done. But life and growth is not always a small ‘ouch’ some ouch(es) are loud and long, resounding on for what seem like eternity with a defeaning deciber.

Most adult don’t grow because they avoid pain like the plague, and understandably so. Every time I approach a growth phase in any area of my life, it is usually so painful. Just thinking of the process puts me in an arduous mental state, usually I have to calm myself down, the temptation is always to retract and settle where my tent is already pitched. Sometimes as I try to take my business to the next level and I am sitted in front of my bank manager, it turns out to be an ouch experience, it is ouch! ouch! ouch!!!! all over as I am hit with interest rate, fees, conditions etc from all possible direction. Sometimes I am thinking, just ‘thinking’ (not even doing anything yet) of a deal and I am covered with ‘ouches’ from head to toe. My thought at those moments are, ‘life can’t be this hard’, or ‘life shouldn’t be this hard’ or ‘life can’t be this painful’. However my observation, reflection and experience is that, yes, life is sometimes this hard and painful. Like the teething child, we get a respite every now and then and then the circle of pain commences again. It is part of the growth process. Champions have accepted this as their mantra.

If you long to grow, accept the ‘ouches’ of life. It can be hard!

… far from it! Life is not black or white. Life comes in all kinds of shade, far more than 50. 50 shades of grey can’t hold a torch to it! It will be much easier if things were white or black, good or bad, this or that. But it is hardly ever like that. The white has some black in it and the black has some white in it and you are not always so sure what pile to put the laundry in! There is no consistency, Some put it in the white pile, some in the black pile, others in the coloured, while some give up on the laundry all together. The ‘this’ has ‘that’ in it and ‘that’ has some ‘this’ in it. Well you guess it, ‘this’ and ‘that’ are somehow cohabiting together!

You cut a ‘black’ person and there is white underneath. A ‘white’ person is bruised and they go black. Actually there is hardly any black or white person. I am yet to see a white person, in the true sense of white and a black person is truely rare.

Few people are 100% good, I doubt any one is, the ones we call good, still occasionally do things that makes us gasp. Surprisingly the bad, throws in a couple of acts of kindness every now and then. The Mafia still goes to church! The insane man still on occasion utter some of the wisest things even heard and the Sage sometimes clearly misses the plot. The sinner does not alway sin and the saint sometimes eye the forbidden fruit! The judge sometimes make unrighteous judgement and the gang leader sometimes judge fairly. The bitter fruit leaves a sweet aftertaste and sweet fruit gets bitter when too sweet. The loved up couple sometimes fight and the fighting couple sometimes kiss. The kind person can be cruel and the cruel person can be kind! And it goes on.

So how do we handle life that is not black or white? How do we treat a good person that has a couple of bad spots? Do we white off the bad person with a white patch? What laundry pile do I put the white shirt with the black colar? How do we navigate this tricky life? A murderer does not murder 24/7, how do we relate when we encouter her, especially if in the midst of a ‘good’ deed? Do we perpetually treat her as a murderer or do we switch off every now and then?

Wow! I started a question and I don’t even know the answer! My stab at answering this, which might be a weak stab, is that we take people, life and things as we encouter them in the moment (I am not feeling this answer! It brings a lot of other questions). If we bring the baggage of our previous encounters and our projections of future encounters into the play we are most likely going to muddle the water and muddled or muddy water is staining.

I am done! I think I am gonna do a runna from this write-up before I dig myself in any deeper.

“… I guess you are putting your legs up today” said the elderly man. “Nothing like that”, replied the young lady. “I have to do the laundry, clean the house, cook dinner, do homework for the children, do their hair, take care of the pets, go grocery shopping etc.” Has he not been trained yet? Asked the elderly man. Who? The young lady ask. “Your other half, your man, your husband, your boyfriend” responded the elderly man. Trained! She was puzzled. “Nobody ever told me he needed training, if anything I thought he was fully trained. Moreover he behaves like he knows everything. I just take it, he is lazy, mean, unkind and just leaves everything to me as he can clearly see all the things that needs doing, he lives in the house!” “No he can’t”, replies the elderly man, “men are blind, he said, they are simple beast, lateral animal”. The young lady was in a state of shock, she felt someone has done a fast one on her. She went into one, “but the store, yes the store, where I got him from, they told me he was fully trained and could see, they actually said he had 20:20 sight and could lead the pack!”

A man once said, that a woman is like an Ikea product! You see a beautiful furniture advertised and you are taken by the beauty, the aesthetic, you can’t wait to lie on your bed, sit on your sofa, show your furniture to your friends. You order the furniture, it arrives in a flatpack box, immediately you know there is a problem. You open the box and rather than a beautiful furniture, all you get is hundreds of bits of ‘who knows what’, some are already rolling away! Your heart sinks. Alright, there is an instruction manual, but you have no patience for that, moreover you hate DIY and for that reason you have no tools. So what does the man do? he yells at the bits on the floor and kicks it around. He cries ‘holy cow!’ the store has done a fast one on him. They advertised a fully assembled product, ready to use!

So there we have it, the untrained and unassembled. The woman is not a teacher, did not sign up for teaching. The man is not interested in DIY, he has no tools. Houston, we have a problem! So what do we do? the woman returns the untrained, and the man returns the unassembled and then peace reigns. But does it? I am not so sure as the woman still needs what she needs and the man still needs his furniture. Some will argue that some stores stock fully trained and fully assembled ‘ones’. Whilst I am inclined to partially agree, I think they are few and far between. I was wondering if a possible way to go round this, is for the woman to go on teaching course and the man to enrol on DIY course, then at least they can both teach and build each other up rather than kick and shout at the unassembled, or give the untrained the evil eye and silent treatment.

What about if the untrained refuse to be trained and the unassembled bits rolled away, never to be found? You ask. Then, Houston we definitely have a problem!!!

But, I will say give training/teaching/educating/assembling a go first! People rarely come fully ready for the task!

… no kidding! But I did, no glasses, no contact lenses, no goggles, no binoculars, no magnifying glass, no nothing! Just my eyes as they come. Now, that was a bold move, I have been wearing glasses for a good number of years, my parents wore glasses and some of my siblings do as well, this wearing glasses business kind of run in the family. So for the first time in my adult life I went around without my glasses, without any form of corrective lenses.

I felt almost as blind as a bat, I was so lost, I bumped into any and everything, everywhere was blurry. I hardly got anything done as I could not find anything. The very little I got done was surrounded in a whole pile of mess. Everywhere I went there was a pile of chaos trailing behind. I didn’t need to see to know it was there, I could feel the chaos I was thriving on. ‘Thriving’ might be pushing things a little bit, actually a big bit, I was just shuffling along, dragging with me only God knows what, I can only imagine what was trailing me.

I somehow managed to survive my first few ‘no glasses’ days without any major catastrophe, if there was, I was not aware, so blissful ignorance probably had a part to play. After some time of this torturous experiment, something started happening, my other senses became more attuned. I was able to ‘feel’ my way around a room. My sense of smell became stronger or rather I paid more attention, I could use my hearing to ‘see’, I could touch my way around, I could taste the air to discern. I could pick up the energy in a room. I was engaging with the world around me very differently. I started ‘seeing’ things I had never seen before. Engaging my senses as I had never done before. Life picked up in a different way, order was slowing being restored. A different manner of order.

My experiment is over and it is time to put my glasses back on. I am wondering, are my glasses truly correcting my vision or are they a hinderance, numbing my other senses and weakening my eyes? I experienced a world I never knew existed without my glasses.

Are all aids aiding us? Maybe some are crutches to keep us just below the revolting line, but prevent us from soaring. Maybe, just maybe, it is worth dropping the crutches a little from time to time to check how far we could go.

We all know the ‘glasses’ we wear. I dared to take my off!

… rescue me! Rescue me!! Rescue me!!! Cried the drowning man. She heard him, she saw him, yet she moved on. “Why would you do that?” They asked her. “If you had listened carefully”, she told them, “you would have heard more than one cry”. There was another cry, a more urgent cry, my personal person was drowning as well. I can only rescue one person, I attended to the more urgent one.

Rescue me! Rescue me!! Rescue me!!! The cry came again. She heard and saw again, yet she moved on. “Why would you do that?” They asked again. He does not need rescuing, she responded. If you look closely, you will note that he is not drowning, he is only seeking attention. If you listen attentively, you will note there is no urgency or fear in his cry, it is a jesting cry, a false alarm, akin to the boy who cried wolf.

Rescue me! Rescue me!! Rescue me!!! The cry came the third time. She heard and she saw but walked away yet again. “Why would you do that?” They asked yet again. I heard and I saw, she replied, but I can’t rescue the drowning man, I am not a lifeguard, I can’t even swim. To try to rescue him will lead to two of us drowning.

Rescue me! Rescue me!! Rescue me!!! The cry came the last and final time. Shw heard, she saw, she jumped in and rescue him and they were both safe.

Not all call for help, we can respond to, some are just beyond us, others land at a time when we ourself are crying out, howbeit silently. Some land at just the right time, when we are willing and able to help and we do help. Wisdom is important and self preservation also has it’s place. A drowning person can not rescue another drowning person irrespective of how loud the cry of the second drowning person is. Somethings can only be done from a place of safety.

Take care of you in order to be able to take care of others!

… I turned my back to leave, and at that very moment, I felt a hand on my shoulder, it was a warm hand, felt the energy, the vibration from the hand go through my body, I paused, stopped in my track and wondered for a split second, slowly I turned back to behold the face, it held my glaze, not in a confrontation manner but in sincerity and honesty, then she spoke to me, she really spoke to me, she didn’t talk at me, we talked but she also listened to me and heard me and we empathised with each other, we said we will catch up and then she rushed off.

My bags were packed already, but I though I might as well do the polite thing and say a little hello and have some small talk, none of it is ever deep, neither party is ever into it. You hardly hear or pay any attention to what each other is saying. It is just the ‘thing’ to do. She truly surprised me because with my ‘how are you?’ She told me exactly how she was, what has been happening to her, how she felt about various things. I must admit I was pleasantly puzzled, did she get me mix up or something? She treated me like a friend. I felt like a friend, she felt like friend, it was warm, it was good. I felt good, I felt happy.

She has always been good to me, about the only one, I hate to admit. She has a sincerity in her eyes and vulnerability about her. She is grounded and down to earth. She is truly lovely if I will be honest, but she took it up a notch! She reached out and opened up. She revealed more and shared more. I was touched. I felt happy and warm.

Heaven knew I needed a touch on my shoulder and I got it.

You will get a touch on your shoulder!

… and what is the big deal if your windscreen is frosted up”? You ask. This is different, I tried to explain. I have never seen anything like this before. It was solid, I underestimated the task before me. I started out with my tiny winy complimentary scraper. As you can expect, it did absolutely nothing, it didn’t even scrap the surface of the frost. The frost stood solid as Mount Zion that can not be moved. I was running late, so I quickly grabbed the bad boy of scraping, the all singing, all dancing telescopic scraper, extendable hand, squeegee and all, nothing happened! I progessed to the Swedish yellow scarper, heavy duty Neoprene holder with the diamond polished scarping edges. Forget it! I really shouldn’t have bothered.

After some time, I gave up all scrappers, threw them away, opened my boot and got out the de-icer, started with the supermarket brand cheap buy one get one free blue solution, poured it all over. I am sure, I need not tell you that nothing happened. I moved on to the branded stuff, poured, sprayed, squirted every branded de icer you can think of over the windscreen, the car and everywhere. At this stage my car was sitting in a pool of blue foamy stuff, everywhere was slippery and I was tripping, but the windscreen was still as frosted as ever.

In desperation, I did the unthinkable, no rational mind would have behaved the way I did, desperation can only be the explanation, I saw what seem to be a hairline crack in the frosted windscreen, so I got out my credit card, thinking I could slide it through and break things up. I am not sure who came up with the crazy idea, but I read about it somewhere. So I started hacking off with the card, I need not tell you what happened, or rather did not happen! Of course the frost did not bulge, but rather my fingers started freezing up as the cold worked its way from my fingers to my hand up my arm and to the rest of my body. I was very cold, cold indeed and this thing was working it’s way to my heart! My heart was getting cold!!!!When this realisation hit me, I stopped! Packed away everything, I mean everything and I went indoor. None of my human effort was going to remove this frost. As long as it is winter, cold and white, this frost was going nowhere. As I sat indoor to ponder my situation, I was made to understand that only the sun can melt this frost. That this is seasonal, no matter how cold, how hard, how long and how white the winter is, the winter season will come to an end and summer will commence, the sun will come out, no frost can withstand the bright yellow burning sun, it must thaw!

And so the sun came out, my windscreen thawed and I drove off happily. The sun will come out for you!

… believe it or not, there is another room! Just let that sink in. I have viewed hundreds of properties in my profession and seen all kind, the good, the bad and the ugly. Some properties just keep giving. On the outside it looks compact, small if you like. And then you go in, look round and you think you are done, but the agent tells you there is yet another room, and sometimes another and even another if you are lucky. One house with more than you expect or think possible.

A child is given a box of chocolate, opens it to reveal a layer/tray with diverse kinds of chocolate, he couldn’t contain himself as he carefully chooses his first one and pops it into his mouth. Carefully again, he covered the box of chocolate, put it somewhere safe and only ate one chocolate on special occasions and that was how he lived his life with the one layer/tray of chocolate. Nobody ever told him him there was another layer of chocolate beneath the first layer and he never thought to check. Another child was given the same box of chocolate, he was excited as well and hurriedly ate two and kept the box. Within a couple of hours the box was out again. He checked the leaflet in the box to be sure he knew the different types of chocolate he had. He lifted the box to see what was written underneath, he checked all the sides, in all his poking and probing he realised the height of the box was higher than the layer/tray of chocolate he had seen and that was when he tipped the box upside down and voila! There! Another layer!

Some are content with their one tray/layer of chocolate. Others say there must be more. Most will stay in their room and make the very best of it. Content they are to live within the confines of the four walls of the room. The room they know is the only one that exists and that is just it. Others wake up one morning and suddenly feel claustrophobic, there is an agitation, the walls are too near, they feel like the walls are closing in, the room no longer feels right. And this is when the search starts. The search for what is unclear, a different city, the other room, sooner or later curiosity leads us to the door of the next room and bravery the keys that opens the next door.

In all these we have a choice, on one hand, stay contended in the one room and rearrange the furnitures from time to time, decorate and redecorate if you please, eat one tray of chocolate and be grateful or on the other hand, explore, be curious, step out of the room, turn the chocolate box upside down. Some say “the future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.”

I know there is another room, I feel it in my bones and when the walls of my current room starts to close in on me, it is time to turn things upside down, to allow curiosity to take me to the door of the next room and bravery the key to get in.

There is another room!

… my journey was smooth, steady and tidy. Uneventful but progressing, very much on course, and then a distraction appeared, except it wasn’t clothed as one, it appeared as an opportunity, an addition and progress. So I started to pursue, expending energy, effort and money. With every attempt there was a road block. I fought and fought, and fought even some more until I totally ran out of steam. Not one to give up easily, I weighted the benefits against the cost and decided to throw in the towel or situation meant the towel was snatched from me. The battle however continued in my mind until I surrendered and truly gave up in my mind as well. That was when the miracle happened! The scales came off my eyes, I saw very clearly, it was never an opportunity, it was a distraction, not a blessing either but a curse. Not having it was my saving grace, my journey would have been totally derailed, hijacked by the curse. I sure am blessed as I proceeded on my journey.

His company I really wanted, his friendship I truly coveted, his counsel I seek, his love I wanted, but none of it was to be. Again I tried so hard, I gave it all I have, I threw at it, all I could, but no, it was not happening. I pondered it long and hard and then I relaxed my grip, I eased on the pursue. I nursed and licked my wounds and massage my bruised ego. Just then the light shone, his company would have stalled the journey, most likely regressed it. Our once similar journeys are now very different. Our paths are no longer common, our callings are now different. The longing for communion is borne out of nostalgia, and we all know, nostalgia is a dirty liar, a seductive one, smoothing out the rough edges and presenting a rosy picture of the good old days. And so we parted company as we proceeded on our separate journeys. It was a blessing it did not happen as I wished, our destinations were different.

Not all withholdings are to be lamented, some are truly a blessing! The purity of our space and journey are to be guarded.

.. I wandered unknowingly into a dangerous forest, I sat down and dozed off. Waking up, I noticed a tiger couched right next to me fast asleep. Bewildered, I packed up speedily and ran away from the forest without disturbing the tiger. At safe distance, from afar, I stood still to observe the forest and it was not just tigers roaming around, but every imaginable dangerous animal! I was truly in the den of wolves, yet my life was preserved! Sometimes we have no idea whatsoever, what **** we have our heads deep into, but He that keepeth and preserveth us neither sleep nor slumber. It is of His mercies that we are not consume. The battle is real, but the victory is assured. It is not by power or might but by the mercies of He that upholds us.

Yesterday, I made what I considered could possibly be some lousy decisions, I said some things that I am not sure were right. I sat to reflect, was that the best I could have done? Did I say the right thing? Was that wisdom? Is that the best that could come out of me? I wondered. Not everything I did yesterday was pleasing to me. I fell short of my assessment. But I have today, I always have today, I always have now and I can do well now, I can do better now, I can improve on what was said now, I can make better decisions. Yes now is good, today is better, I have a choice now. Yesterday is gone, I can’t reach it, tomorrow is not here either. But now is where I am, where I can be my possible best is now. Yesterday is irrelevant. There will always be a now!

Humans are a rare specie, I have come to discover. From time to time, you can swear on your life that a brother has your back. You laugh together, ate together, long walk together, just been there together, done it all together. You know him and he knows you, at least you think. But he ain’t got your nothing. He has flipped on you. Yes, he is tripping and you don’t even know. Judaes do exist and sometimes they are in our camp and that is just the way of man.

Told you! No rhyme or rhythm.