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    Being Average: Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.
    Being Average: Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.
    Being Average: Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Being Average: Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.

    By Khuzwayo Tembo

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    About this ebook

    Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKhuzwayo Tembo
    Release dateDec 29, 2018
    ISBN9781386416425
    Being Average: Soliloquies on the First Principles of Personal Failure and Inefficiency.
    Author

    Khuzwayo Tembo

    Khuzwayo Tembo (also known as Genesis) is a zambian writer and award winning spoken word poet. He has a bachelor's degree in Civil and Environmental engineering from the University of Zambia.

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      Book preview

      Being Average - Khuzwayo Tembo

      Thandolwethu,

      This book is primarily dedicated to you. As I write this, we are a few days away from your arrival. To be honest, I am full of envy. A zero clock is awaiting your arrival in the throne room of God and any second now it will start ticking. You will never be alone. Here, waiting for you, is a whole crew, ready to cheer and support your every move. Ahead of you is everything that any man can dream of-the opportunity to start everything afresh- a new and blank page. I am looking forward to reading every word of you. And with much fear and excitement welling up within me, I have never known such war- the chaos that causes me to dream of all the possibilities that lie ahead of you in a world that is full of both wonder and misery. I can’t wait to discover how much of you is your mother, light skin and laughter with a little bit of fight, and how much of you is your father, dark skinned, little bit of music and a whole lot of crazy. I have a thousand questions to ask God about you but I’ll wait until he reveals you, day by day, fraction by fraction, molding you for his own purpose.

      However, I fear because I know that the world is waiting to impose itself on you. Too many opinions are hungry for a fresh heart to rest in and I pray that yours will be guarded from the very beginning. Your little heartbeat resounds the drums of a war that is about to begin. A war that will wage within you for as long as you live, daily seeking to take away a little more sunshine from your smile. But I pray that your fingers will learn the stroke of a pen before your knuckles ever know the face of a man. There are a thousand ways to win a fight. Pick the most effective. The strongest never need to prove themselves, their mere existence is a threat to society.

      May you learn that time tells a far better story than moments, so don’t let occurrences define who you are.

      Uncle Genesis.

      Acknowledgements.

      I am eternally grateful to God for his kindness and goodness to me. I have known the abundance of His goodness and faithfulness all my life. I do not deserve a fraction of the opportunities he has availed to me.

      To my supportive family, to which I owe my gratitude for the encouragement and support you have always shown for my work and art, I am grateful. Your presence at every poetry show and your keenness to read the first draft of this book really encouraged me. Thank you.

      Lungile Chimya, thank you for always lending me a listening ear as I wrestled with much of this material. Our conversations are the seed from which many of these thoughts have budded. You gave me a profound sense of clarity by asking me important and searching questions that sent me to think more deeply and carefully about the different aspects of this book. Thank you for volunteering yourself to read through and edit this work despite your busy medical-school schedule.

      Kasewe Banda for being my editor, but more so, for the thought-provoking discussions we had at the University of Zambia, President 5, Room 16, during the vacation leading up to my final semester in 2017. It was then that I was convinced that I needed to start writing a longer and more comprehensive work.

      I must give special recognition to Brother Stephen Phiri, a man who believed in me and meticulously taught me the art of the queen’s language. This work would have been close to impossible without you.

      To Luka Mwango, for leading the way and showing us it is possible for young poets to pursue their passion for writing to its very end, you will always be remembered. This work was largely inspired and encouraged by you. Thank You.

      To Chimfwembe and Mutale Ngaba, for assuring me that at least two people will read this book. Your support and encouragement have played a major role in the completion of this book. There are days when I resumed my writing simply because you encouraged me to do so. To you and everyone, friends and family, whom I may not be able to list down lest I write an entire book of acknowledgements, the English language falls short, but thank you!

      ––––––––

      PREMBLE

      I write this book for a number of reasons, not the least one being that I have been planning to put these thoughts down for a long time and I owed it to myself to start and finish it. It’s a shame how many things I have left unfinished in my life. My mother always says, Learn to finish what you have started. I should have learned early on to heed her advice. Nevertheless, all is not lost.

      I have always been a dreamer. It has been both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because I have thoroughly enjoyed my life already, always seeking for a new curiosity to satisfy, and a curse because I often get bored by monotony, and I’ve found that the world can be so full of it sometimes.

      Something keeps me up at night. It is a nightmare I can’t seem to shake off! I am haunted by the thought that one day I will be no more and there will be no trace of who I was or what I left behind. It is the fear that I would have been just another human being that lived and died. It is not so much a fear of death as it is a fear of life itself. It is the idea that my life would be so insignificant that my death would mean nothing.

      As I type this down, sitting in an office that I share with nine workmates, there are close to 8 billion people on earth. Now that’s quite a huge number! What is even more amusing is the thought that we are not as unique as we may imagine. We are very similar, and in fact, our similarities are what make us human. We are significantly different from every other creature, and yet much more similar to each other. Still, despite this fact a deep and profound sense of value is found in our little differences. We aren’t the same in every sense. We all have different passions, goals and inspirations. There are a myriad different things that make us tick. We are a widely diverse set of beings that have a vast variety of abilities, cultures, trends, habits and norms. This duality of our sameness and difference is striking, and it has played a major role in steering me towards many of the thoughts I share in this book.

      This book is an attempt to provoke you to pursue that deep and profound value that is found in being different. I will do this by showing you how easy it is to disappear into the oblivion of being average. If you follow the map I am about to lay out before you, I can guarantee that you will have no problems with laying low. Your next door neighbor will hardly recognize your presence or absence. You will walk and live, and then you will breathe no more. You will swiftly, or maybe slowly but surely disappear with the wind of your passing. Nothing will be said of you apart from the traditional mourns and cries that send us all away after we are laid in the ground. A shrub and a bush will plant their roots in the ground that will become you. And they too will be nothing special, just another shrub, and just another bush, amongst billions of other shrubs and bushes that grew on the graves of billions of other average humans.

      Introduction

      Why I Shouldn’t Have Written This Book

      A recurring thought continues to bug me as I sit here, why am I writing this book? What right do I have to think about these thing, let alone write them in a book?

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