The Adventure of Life

I am a collector of memories, as I assume every living human being is. The recently passed week added to my collection very interesting stock to treasure. It was particularly enlightening because it offered me the opportunity to reflect on memories. Like a photo album, I tirelessly watched the floating memories of time in my mind and my words.  The best part of the reflections was that, I had to share the accumulated snapshots for the last twenty-seven years. Yes, share with a group of curious creative people who will not wait but eagerly gulp on every memory, sip every word, analyse every life’s screenshot and perhaps categorise you into any lot they find fit. For whatever it is worth, I enjoyed the mirroring exercise with very little concern for the category I fitted in if any at all.

Permit me to digress, only for a paragraph, for the sake of the overall objective of this article. In my professional career, I have had the opportunity of taking some of the most advanced personality test intending to aid career progression and succession planning. The last one I took was the Myers Briggs Personality Test. This test as much as many others have something in common, to profile the subject. As a Risk Analyst, I appreciate the concept of profiling thoroughly. Categorisation offers the bases from which complex decision are made and I am sure the enquiry helped guide others as to what their opinions will be if I ever came to the picture. The profiling was however not done by others only, I got the opportunity to re-examine if at all I could fit somewhere.

Before I share the three key lessons from the exercise let me be quick to say Myers Briggs gave me the same score for introversion as much as extroversion, this results is not unique to Myers Briggs, other tests I have had suggests similar things. I do not find these results surprising after all, I love Neil Burger’s film, ‘Divergent’. In my mind I am ‘Four- Tobias Eaton’ or even better, Beatrice Prior, 100% divergent!

• All things are possible is not a mere rhetoric: As I went through the stories of strength and weakness, good and bad, happy and sad, regrets and lessons, one key lesson which stands out is the possibility of time. From a humble background in Duayaw Nkwanta Local Authority Junior Secondary all through to a Masters  degree and an ongoing legal education, that can only point to possibility. No one needs emphasise, we are the sum total of our experiences, knowledge and summarily our exposures. The hard truth however lurks, our future is in our mind, howbeit subject to what we can imagine from the past we have had. Whatever the past has being for whoever, my life tells a story of possibility if only one will be focused enough.

• Fear is made of nothing: People are often afraid to open up to new ideas, people, places and challenges. Interestingly the rule of nature is, adaptation. Tides and times are ever evolving and survivors have the best adaptability. I have seen worlds in my few years and I intend to see many more. I have seen the handwork of poverty and have equally seen the testimony of wealth, I have seen righteousness as much as sin and I have tested knowledge and stupidity. I do not suggest what I have seen is anything close to a percent of what there is to know but from what I know, I have learnt shedding fear is key to living fully. A challenge to confront one's fear at a time leads to discovery of purpose. We all love to be secretive because we are afraid of confronting the past fully, I dare to confront every dark and light within me without fear, I hope that inspires somebody to at least embrace life as an adventure from which we must tell a story of legacy 

 

• Be limitless: I do not fit into any categorisation. Since I was a child, I have never fitted and I have stopped struggling to. It is good to have people place you in a bracket but that’s just not me. I thought I was wrong till I heard Jesus suggest same in John’s epistle, third chapter and eighth verse. As a wind, my promise to myself, refusing to be categorised by anybody under the sun. 

I conclude only with the hope that somebody finds the courage to know themselves thoroughly beyond any impossibility, fear or limitation. I was once asked to find a title for a book, song, movie which will adequately summarise my life’s story. After a long stretch of thought, all I could agree on was ‘Adventure’, a life not defined or relapsed to a model or rules but one leading the course of life to find a new path. I hope this helps somebody embrace their race to pursue their own adventure.

A City in my Dreams?

I share an engagement with my imagination as I travelled through this town called Atimpoku in Ghana some few weeks ago. It was not my first time on this road, neither was this my first reflection of such greatness as we could build. My imagination however always slips towards the steep slopes of UTOPIA as I think of such gifts as nature has endowed this land. Sharing my reflections on utopia is a burden I carry, one guided by the touch of realism in order to prevent a wild stray into fantasies. Yet I pray you to indulge my dreams in the light of hope to building, and a passion to pursue such ends such as beauty may behold.

  

 John Keats, the English Poet, noted about beauty "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." Even eternal does Dante Alighieri, the great Italian Poet, think of beauty; "Heat cannot be separated from fire, or Beauty from The Eternal". Yet among us, we unfortunately taint the best of beauties; we paint poverty, ignorance and dirt into natures best designs. We bring to naught the many gifts and sorrowfully fail to see the beauty therein. In my reflections, I found:

1. The parable of the talent is more real than we want to believe. One of the common parables of Jesus is known to be of a master travelling to a far country. He gives talents to his servants and upon coming required of them returns. The gifts of each of the servants returned a fold of its own  kind but for the one with the least. He pays no attention to his talent and disregards it by hiding it. The master comes, requires of his talent and the returns and finds out that, this one servant bore no fruits. Such act of 'cautiousness' and 'safe-keeping' of the servant was regarded as wicked and unfaithful by the master who ceases his one talent and gives it to the one with the most. I am tempted to thinking in my wild minds that, this servant comes from my homeland because with all we have been given we do nothing with it. And scared more so, for what shall our judgement of these treasures and beauty be?
2. Fairyland are built from nothing anyway. Disneyland, a story that will always be told. An awe built from but an imagination of a man who visited a park with his daughters. In Walter E. Disney words about the land of his creation, he said,"To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relieves fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenges and promise and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world." In this story of Disney and the hard compelling facts of our reality of disregarded beauty, I still share hope because change starts with a mindset. Beauty is built with dreams and hopes as foundational Pillars.
3. The gate through which our shame may be rolled off is putting our imaginations to work. I could not imagine people found space within own imaginative space to heap rubbish by such beautiful water bodies. I could barely find something critically thought through that took my breath away, rather I gasped with surprise how much waste beauty has been put to. I do not intend to be unnecessarily critical about this town but to bring to bear the need to put our imaginations to work. This is but a case in point, and in many cases much more severe negligence are paraded with relish. We barely care least notice and do anything about it.

I pray we may find an inspiration to stretch our minds towards that which is of beauty and to press on towards making beauty happen for Africa.

Our faith should be our strength. Let us find solace in Paul's thought that, "God can do immeasurably more than all we ask or can dare to imagine, according to the power which works in us."(Ephesians. 3:20)Let us grow beyond being easily content with lowly things and let's press demand on grace far above mediocrity where it lies now.

I dare plead a cause that we may engage our minds to beauty, and to pursue and create all that is noble, pure and glorious. Let us find reason to press towards utopia for as in the Poet Victor Hugo's words, "To love beauty is to see light". 

Let us reclaim our righteous minds and put it to task!