I Wish You A Hard Life

Life-both the being and doing facets of it-is hard. Nothing ever seems to go as planned.

At 6, you wanted to be a pilot.

At 13, you decided that sky and its limit were just too high so you settled for being a doctor.

At 18, JAMB* jambs you into being a zoologist.

At 26, you’re selling shoes, turkey gowns, and super double-drawn egg curls on WhatsApp.

Life really comes at you hard.

Just when you think you are getting the hang of it, just when you know the right time to zig and the right time to zag, the carpet is pulled out from under you. It disorients you and leaves you unsure of where you are and where you are going.

I like to think of life as that topic you’re told was too advanced for you in the final year of secondary school. “When you get to the University, they’ll explain further,” they smiled. Only for you to get to University and they tell you, “I assume they taught you this in your respective secondary schools? Great, let’s move on.”

No matter how hard you try, you cannot seem to catch a damn break. Something inexplicable is always happening at work or at school, in your relationships, or with your children. Like my Mom will say, “ Ezumike adiro na ndu. Sonso ndi nwulu anwu na-ezu ike… “ (There is no respite in life. Only the dead truly rest).

And honestly, we can’t even be sure the dead truly rest.

No one has come back to tell us. Maybe they are so busy they can’t even make out the time to check in with loved ones. Kinda gives ghosting a whole new meaning.

For me, philosophy will always be the purest of social sciences. It is the embodiment of man’s wide-eyed and child-like attempts to rationalize and reconcile the concentric events in his external and internal world. It treats the external as being both independent of and an extension of the internal. So to make sense of life’s hardships, we rationalize and postulate a grand, invisible purpose to the current struggle we are facing, a figurative pot of gold at the end of hardship’s rainbow.