Be warned, please. This is going to be a really long thing. It might run into weeks, even months, before the package is exhausted. Rest assured though, you’d find the series needful, useful and didactic.
I turned 50, last Thursday, the 12th day of August in the year of our Lord twenty twenty-one. Both the build-up and the day proper afforded me layers of deep insights into what the empty dream called life is all about. In sharing them with you, the belief is that whether you are under or fiftyish or above, you would on one hand either learn enough to prepare or on the other understand enough to seek solace. Do well to read the foregoing again and do well-er to never forget the point.
Let’s start from the fiftiness, itself. Apart perhaps from slight body changes here and there, I have neither recorded nor experienced any fundamental feelings. In my mind, I still feel twentyish. However, for the first time in my life, I believe I now have qualified for a particular licence -the licence of age.
I can explain that. Where I come from, everyone sees everyone as a child. When you talk in public and ruffle some feathers in the process, you can be rudely asked to shut up and sit down. To rub it in, the person screaming that command would never forget to add, ‘you insulting child!’
Up until 50, no one ever ordered me about like that; partly because I ensured it never happened. But, now, I may no longer need to walk on eggs. I am an old man. In fact, I have immediately joined the cultural bad gang; I shall start ordering insulting children to shut up and sit down.
If you find that funny, let me make it funnier for you. I already have a number of targets on whom I cannot wait to exercise my newfound authority. They know themselves. Friends and colleagues who are nowhere near my age but who have been rubbing shoulders all the while.
50 is class. While each of its pre-ages might be said to be a social leveller, 50 is a snoot in a mischievously sweet sense. I was happy when I turned 30, happier when 40 but 50 is the real deal. I am happiest because -wait for it- no one can dare refer to me anymore as a child!
And, now the the 50-year-old lessons. Number one, don’t kill yourself. Don’t over-worry about life, about people, about wealth, about plans, about expectation. What will happen will happen, willy nilly.
Understand that an alarming majority of the people you are good to would in the past never have been and would in the future never be good to you or your blood. That will help you to do good for good sake not in anticipation of any human acknowledgment or reward. Understand also that life makes too much room for hypocrisy and idiocy and evil. That way, you won’t develop high blood pressure when you notice that the so-called good ruler who mouthed goodness only ended up rewarding badness more.
Or when you see princes and princesses toing and froing on barefoot day by day while slaves adorn latest footwears and are chauffeur-driven. Furthermore, understand that hard work is not the sole criterion for success, nor for money, nor for acceptability, nor for validation, let alone for love or for respect. You can be hated, despised, failed, rejected or passed over just because you work(ed) hard. Sssh, I am not saying you should stop working hard.
I am only saying that mediocrity, envy, hate, blackmail and allied little-mindednesses can make mincemeat of all the hard work in the world. Still, work hard. But, side by side all that diligence, all that seriousness, all that quality work, be so smart to keep an open mind -because, as someone has postulated, hard work is what the boss says it is. So, do not work hard just for the concomitant compensation which might not come; work hard because it is good to.
Number two, learn the fundamental lesson of seasons, times, tides. Know when and how to abound as well as when and how to abide. Be thankful for and enjoy where you are, per time. Too many people waste their life focusing on where they are not, where they would prefer to be; what they don’t have, what they would rather they had.
Be different. Forget all that they may have told you: no man promotes another. Promotion is a divine process. Believing otherwise could culminate in frustration and in bitterness and in sickness and in depression and even in early death.
Next, don’t make plans based simply on human trust. 98% of the crowd on your big day may jolly well be people you never invited or expected or thought would turn up. 98% of your staunchest supporters would always be people you have never done anything special for. Conversely, 98% of those behind the sudden anti-you chants, crucify, crucify, could have migrated from the same choir that sang the earlier pro-you chorus, hosanna, hosanna; the very same people who used to be tied to your apron strings; the very same people who used to be at your beck and call, 25 hours daily!
Therefore, no matter the attraction or the temptation or both, never be carried away by the applause or words of any human being; much less those of the devil. Always be conscious, always be deliberate. Always be consciously deliberate; always be deliberately conscious. Thank me later, even if you can’t.
I cannot end this opener sans telling you about family. Never joke with those. For them, do even what you can’t. Always remember that they are your last team standing; your first, last and best line of defence.
When you attain 50, you will learn that family is not only about blood. At 50, you’d be so experienced to teach others one of the things life has taught you; namely, that, water also has the potentiality of being thicker than blood. So, every day you live, strive to be both water and blood. It is the only, quickest, best way to make our world the El Dorado it should be -not the animal kingdom into which we have transmogrified it.
God bless Nigeria!
… To be continued next Monday
