Rick Warren’s idea of you have been conceived in the mind of God before you were conceived by your parents popped up as I thought of this piece; but God has created this world not for you to swim like a fish in the well but to glide with other species in the sea of life. Imagine if you alone would successfully walked this world without the touch and feel of others, then maybe God doesn’t need to populate this planet with creatures of many kinds. But as you can see, nothing of such is happening here. You and I are just a part of the earth and like all other parts, we make the whole meaningful. So to live a whole meaningful life that will shake suffering to the end, we better roll up our sleeves and reach out either to help or seek help. But first, we need to understand the dependent, independent and interdependent paradigms of human life before anything.
“We each begin life as an infant” Stephen Covey writes in his highly influential book, seven habits of highly effective people ” we are directed, nurtured and sustained by others. Without this nurturing, we would only live for a few hours or few days at most. Then gradually, over the ensuing months and years, we become more and more independent-physically, mentally, emotionally, financially – until eventually, we can take care of ourselves, becoming inner directed and self reliant”. As we continue to grow and mature, he continued, we became increasingly aware that all of nature is interdependent, that there is an ecological system that governs nature, including society. We further discover that the higher reaches that our nature have, to do with our relationships with others — that human life is also interdependent.
Living the Interdependent life.
Towards the last phase of last year, i faced an existential knot of paying my last paltry tuition fee, it was a nerve wracking moment. That singular experience now has an enormous impact on my perception of life in particular and the interdependent paradigm in general. Straight from childhood, I was taught never to conceal my woes beneath my belly, the act of speaking up when faced with the inescapable agony of life is an integral part of upbringing in Africa, especially amongst the Yorubas. In their wisdom which has become proverbial, they would say “Owo ti ban duni, enikan kii fi sabe aso” meaning: you do not hide your sick hand beneath your garment.
While time ticks and the university payment portal intermittently blinks, worries in me stoked — and what I did next was to blurt out. Reach out! The silent voice in me commanded — and peremptorily, I did, but what I got was help far beyond expectation I’d requested. Had I concealed such plights, better to imagine the outcome. Of course, before anything, we were dependent being, then we metamorphosed into becoming responsible by way of being independent: standing alone, thinking alone and becoming the architect of our own damn life; then, we advanced to becoming interdependent: the ultimate level of human interaction and relationship. But here, living the interdependent life by now with swathe of social media accounts that seems to demystified our worries when in actual fact complicated it requires deep down approach towards uncovering the nuances of those platforms.
Now, it’s not just in success that we need people. Physically, more than the social media buzz, the sound that spatter from our head sets or ear plugs. Interacting face to face with others, findings revealed are essential especially as the world move towards stamping narcissistic tendencies over collective interests. But no matter what those drivers of our lives (the capitalists, religious leaders, celebrities and others) would want us to believe as to why we need to stand alone,walk alone and do it all alone, we must never forget that leveraging on the strength of others would help trigger our own inner potential and spur us to move at a stratospheric speed.
“I am depressed” she told me!
A while ago, i had a chat with a female friend who revealed to me how depressed she has been, by her narrative, it seems she has been in all these alone: fighting alone, walking the tight rope of life alone and getting knocked down all alone. To her, the daily life drudgery seems not to be in tandem with what she’s getting — and that alone is enough to get her depressed, sadden and discouraged.
With rapt attention, I listened as she walked me through her plights and pains. She seems to be wanting to share all these with someone, but she’s only getting people who listen to tell her how miniature what she’s passing through are compare to theirs. These days, people hardly listen, they hardly listen with empathy, they hardly listen to enter into other people’s world without uttering a word. All they do is to provide band aid, palliatives and quick fix. In other words, people keep issues beneath not because they are too proud or full of pride, but because they are scared the next person might just listen to sieve and downplay their emotional upheaval.
The power of Now.
“Pain” in the words of Eckart Tolle, author of the power of Now “is inevitable as long as you identified with your mind which is to say as long as you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. I am talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause of physical pain and physical disease”. He furthered “resentment, hatred, self pity, guilt, anger, depression, jealously and so on, even the slightest irritation, are all forms of pain. And every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain, its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time” Said he “there are two levels of pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain”.
Why not seek help or help those that need it Now; remember, death is not the end of life, it is the start to another life.
#Speak and Listen
#StayStrongAlways
#ReachOutNow
