Life As I See It By Ojoh Taiwo O.

While I am too young to talk about life, I suppose as a young man with a couple of life changing experiences I can pull a meaning out of different things that have had impact on my view of the world and its inhabitants. My views I must say are entirely mine, not that of my religion, my family, friends or associates. Well let me begin by saying that my life has been crammed with a great deal of consequential chapters. Playing around in the neighborhood I see and learn many things from my very innocent dayto-day little boy activities. From the most trivial episode to the most amazing; Rolling tires around, playing with sands, our babyish hide and seek game, who is in the garden, down the road kiting, early morning stage shows at the community well, funny scenes as I pass through different street every morning going to school. Not to mention are some horrible events that befuddled my innocent mind; Shylock Landlords, Husband and wife infidelity squabble, mysterious sudden deaths,,, Pointless neighborhood clashes. As a child, I tried in my own little way to explain the ways of life but everyday my views change because something always happens to bow my accepted wisdom. Very early in my life I come to understand that there are many ways to define our insubstantial existence; yes many ways to give our life meaning. Within all of us are set of beliefs and not beliefs that help position the foundation and rudiments of our existence. They are exclusively and individually crafted from our religious orientation, experiences, and delicate choices in life. These sets of beliefs later become the philosophies that guide us in the journey through life; they are the core values that make up our character, and our compass in the journey through lifes stormy waters. They help put some meaning and order into our existence. Most significantly, these beliefs becomes the fundamental index that we use to explain the ways of life and all it constituents. In my view, it is the combination of these philosophical main beliefs such as the concept of morality and the freedom to make our own decisions that makes whom and what we are. My own ideals have lighted my way, given me renewed nerve to face life with a smile, and taught me the importance of showing love in a connected world. With a deep reflection on this daily life, I come to understand that we all exist for one another; unknown to all of us, our happiness is dependent on the well-being of others and our smiles are bound by their ties of compassion, benevolence, and kindheartedness. We are all part of one planet; we do not have to fight to build our own different place in it. Whatever happens to the remotest person to us will surely affects us even more gravely. Ted Perry once wrote, All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man does not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. We are not separate, and we are never disconnected, we all are one. All our moments of sadness, anguish, deep pains, adversities, and confusion are caused by a credence and belief that we exist in isolation. When one of us is in danger, we are all at threat because we are all people on a voyage searching for something or someone in life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to support one another in times of need. Ted Perrys view of our interdependency reminds me of a moonlight story related by my late paternal grandmother. The story goes thus: Many many years ago when all animals were friends and all men acquaintances... there lived a farmer and his wife one day ;

A mouse looked through the crack in the wall and saw the farmer and his wife open a parcel. What food might this contain?" The mouse wondered. He was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. The mouse immediately ran back to the farmyard, and announced this warning, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The hen cooed and scratched, raised her head and said, "Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a serious worry to you but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be troubled by it." The mouse turned to the pig and told him, "There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!" The pig expressed sympathy but said, "I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers." The mouse turned to the cow and sounded the same warning . The cow said, "Wow, Mr. Mouse. I'm sad for you, but it's no skin off my nose." Gloomy, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer's mousetrap and possible death... all alone with no ones help. That very night a sound was heard throughout the house - the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey. In the darkness, the farmer's wife hurried to see what was caught. It was a venomous snake whose tail was caught in the trap. The snake bit the farmer's wife. The farmer rushed her to the village physician. When she returned home, she still had a fever. The village physician recommended that he treat the fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup's main ingredient (the hen). But his wife's sickness continued. Friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig. But, alas, the farmer's wife did not get well... She died. So many people came for her funeral that the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them for the funeral luncheon. And the mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness. The moral of this story as explained by my grandmother was that we must be our brothers keeper. We must learn to lean on each other, to bring back power in each other as brothers so that when enemy forces try to hammer us down, together we will wither the tempest. We must realize that our happiness is not complete if the man next door is unhappy. We all need one another because somehow our fate in this world is connected. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle once said, He who is unable to live in society, or has no need because he is self sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. To me I reason that many of our problems are because of the way we relate with one another. We are so conceited, so selfabsorbed, and so dim-witted that believe we are in no need of others. Nevertheless, the actual truth is that there is a bond with everything in life and we must be careful what we say and think. Whatever we throw out will catch up with us. We do not hurt others, when we smile people smile back and when we snap at people they snap back at us. We must learn to love, forgive and show kindness. In forgiving others, we pardon ourselves. We fight not our supposed enemies but ourselves. We are mad not at others but ourselves. We must learn to accommodate, tolerate, and show love to one another because we all belong to a bigger print. As far as my view of life goes a hundred-page book would not contain my lists of beliefs and not beliefs. As a Christian, I believe that life is a gift from God and I believe that life is a journey and a race the primary purpose of which to serve the creator to gain salvation in paradise. Life is a long zigzag journey full of unpredictable spill of unusually startling, unpremeditated episodes both good and bad. Many of us hurried through while very few actually stop to read between the lines of life because life is

something that requires a considerable amount of physical, mental and spiritual exertion to comprehend. To read between the lines of life is to learn to sip in the infinite lessons from our onerous journeys of the past, our inescapable present tense and use them towards those coming in the future. We are responsible for whatever happens or fail to happen in our life. Jim Westergren once compared life to a game of chess. In chess, the goal is to check mate. We control the pawns, the bishops, the knights and the queen, how they move and what happens. We try to predict what our opponent is going to do and every move we make is very important, has a consequence, and determines whether we win or lose. The same in life. If we can predict the consequences of every of our actions or how our inactions affects everything else in our life we will surely win in the game of life. But the biggest difference between a game of chess and the real life is that whereas in chess we know all the rules and can easily predict the game, the real life game is so intricate and the stakes much more higher. In life, the journey begins as a feeble infant on the bed. We learn on as we live, first from our parent and then from the society. Many times, we learn from our own experiences and shortcomings. This on the game rules learning makes it almost impossible to win. Nevertheless, I hold the belief that one of the goals of life is to overcome. To succeed in the real life game, we must be prepared to sacrifice our time and position our mind frame toward success. We need not rush through nastily. We should take one-step at a time. Each stride well projected. Balance yourself, scan the aerial, predict your opponent with maximum accuracy, make a move and checkmate. Nothing should impinge on us in our daily quest for success in life. The singular most important rule as religions teach us is love. When we learn to work together as a team and reach out to one another in the game of life, we can control the happenings around us. We will checkmate, and we will not be the sacrificial animal to redeem the life of the farmers wife or the delectable barbecued meat used to appease her soul in a merry making funeral. Life is a teacher and all of life is learning. We learn our lessons somehow; the rules of the real life game. The lessons become easier and less tedious with the help of others. Life can be love and the lessons pleasant if only we begin to truly, reach out for one another. The saying that life is a teacher is what many of us take for granted. No matter how much we know there is more we can learn. We should never ever, assume we know all about something. There are certain times in my life that I look back and wished I had been wiser. Moreover, the verdicts we take are what plot our path in life. One of my philosophies of life is making the present ever so beautiful that it will be worth remembering because our deeds in life is like a picture. Worth more than the images, a picture is full of memories. Whether it is a portrait from the kindergarten school days, a wedding bash, or a family photograph; it never about the images in the picture but the time defying memories of the events in our life that the picture brings back to mind. Pick up a picture, name the faces, and identify the time in history. Then in retrospect, we wish we could have back one of those moments again, change the time space, and rewrite our past to suit our ideal present. Stephen Grellett once said, I expect to pass through this world but once, therefore, any good that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not differ it or neglect it, for I shall not come this way again . We must seize the moment because we cannot teleport our self-back into the picture to adjust our posture, change our cloth and perfume it or dab our face with a powder. The hen is gone with the fever curing fresh chicken soup, the pig butchered, and the cow slaughtered for the funeral luncheon. Life has taken away so much from many of us, but it is our individual responsibility to learn lessons from those episodorial events. Religion teaches us sin, guilt, and true repentance. However, as humans, I believe we are never innately evil. The holy books say that we are made in the image of the invisible God who is love. We are capable of showing love and kindness. The freedom to make our own decisions is what creates our differences, which in turn create an environment of anarchy and confusion.

That we all have differences is one of the principles I live by. Katherine Anne Porter once said, There seems to be a kind of order in the universein the movement of the stars, turning of the earth and in the changing of the seasons. But human life is in almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelingsmistaking the motives of others and his own. We fail to understand each other and accept the fact that someone elses set of beliefs, opinions and philosophies of life may also be right or that even our own principle may be critically flawed. We do not realize that we do evil, appalling things to people that do kind things to us just because we feel that their opinions and philosophies differs from ours. We are always too sure of our own principles of right and wrong that we do not take our time to understand the man next door and are critical of our work mates. We fall into troubles because of the many lies and wounding things we say to each other. In my little years of existence, I have been wholly truthful, kind, and loving. But I have also been greatly deceitful, done many bad shameful things, hidden vital truths to save my ass, and have told many lies; lied for myself and for people, because lies are easier to tell than the truth especially when I realize that the stakes are higher. The truth sometimes could be just too murky to let slip and the consequences may be just too inconceivable. But then I must say that deep down I know it doesnt really worth it. Particularly when I think about other numerous sins that I will have to answer on the day of judgment by a superior authority that knows my entire past. However, I hold this belief that in life what wears us down the most arent the wrong things we do. What really matters is what we do to correct our evils, acts of cowardice and wrongdoings. It is said that the average human has a grand total of about 2 billion seconds to live out his existence. Tennessee Williams once wrote, We all live in a house of fire. No fire department to call. No way out. Just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house downwith us trapped, locked in it. Distress callsMAY-DAY! MAY-DAY! MAY-DAY! Plane crashes, heart stops beating, we lay cold dead our body parts scattered someplace somewhere, and life ends! Charles Bukowsky once wrote, There will always be something to ruin our lives. It all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken TWO BILLION SECONDS! It is what we do now to try to fix our mess in life that truly counts. The white man has a saying yesterday is gone, the present is ours and the future belongs to God It is what we do now to try to change because what will be tomorrow nobody knows but the creator. Change is the keyword in our race in life; we cannot change where we started from and we cannot undo our mistakes but we can change the direction we are heading. To succeed we must try not to relive the ugly past. Whether we decide to change or linger, we choose our own fate, it is in our hands, and we are the captain of our souls. No matter how charged with punishment the scroll, we all can change if we make an effort, because the almighty God in his inestimable understanding of our imperfect state has given us the strength to do so. The true human condition in our connected world is that people are not always, what they seem because we are never only one thing. Humans change: not for the better, and not for the worse, and not permanently. People change, then change, then change back. That is the human condition. We are born to love but we do bad things not because we are instinctively bad but because we think life that life is hard, unkind, and unpitying. We take pleasure doing evils and maiming others to avenge our misfortune. We lose every sense of direction and reason in life. The consequence of these is that the forces of evil are always fighting to destroy what is good. We invoke these vices when deception and falsehood come into play. We aimed the pistol but missed yet we claimed we never wanted to shoot. And when the consequences of our deeds keep unraveling we try like hell to cover our tracks. To avoid hell, we act as though we are born again. We rebuke the devil as the culprit and wont allow him to prove his innocence because it would be against conventional morals if he succeeded in proving his neutrality. The consequence is that we overreach ourselves and the devil gets the better of us after all. If our conscience torments us, we engage in prayer sessions that seem fervent but cannot cut an ice. This is sheer madness and hypocrisy. We do these things because we believe lip repentance is a magic wand that can erase all our evils. I wonder what specie of heart some of us carry. Regardless of the duration or the sweat put out it is impossible to teleport into the picture to wash our dirty laundry, the truth cant be denied, it did happen, and no matter how hard we fight to

forget it, it will always be there inside us in our time defying memories. Someone once wrote, There are three guardian angels, three spiritual elements inside all of us, three keepers of our life. The Soul, The Heart, and The Mind. I assume and believe that this is our God - given conscience. It never robs us of the truth or the feelings we have within. Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, no man for any considerable periodcan wear one face to himself and another to the multitudewithout finally bewildered as to which may be true. Hiding self is the greatest act of folly and self-destruction. We fail to understand that it is impossible to hide. I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson there is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Life is a self-balancing act. The more we try to hide our evils, the more we actually show the type of person we are. When I take a look at my life now, I can see how my understanding of the world keeps evolving. There are many noteworthy events in my life, but few are life changing which have had profound influence on my view of the world. Life is love. Life is a gift. Life is a race. Life is a challenge. Life is a riddle. Life is a game. Life is pain. Think about life,,, congratulations, happy birthdays, happy married life, screaming kids, nagging wives, resentful neighbors, crazy bosses, deceitful friends, you bloody idiot, go away you there, another bottle please, condolences,,, rest in peace. Life is unexplainable? For everything that I believe, for every philosophy that I live by I also hold something to the contrary. I hold no absolute view and I do not think that I ever will.