Not Messing with Fate

How does one know what fate has been reserved for them? We see opportunities and challenges everywhere we turn. Some opportunities we take. Others, we shun. The same for challenges. Hence our eternal gravitation from fulfillment to disenchantment, and back to fulfillment again, as we navigate life's contours. While opportunities are welcome, they are not as exhilarating as challenges. Imagine that feeling of accomplishment when you last surmounted what you considered a Herculean challenge. While you might have felt one with Hercules, what if that challenge had not been yours for the taking and that fulfillment eventually led you down the path of disenchantment.

In the grand scheme of things that is an oxymoron, because the triumph over one challenge endows you with the fortitude to vanquish the next- which is bound to be a little more difficult. So my advise to anyone would be to take life in stride. In the eternal crossroads of life, we know not our fates, until the journey comes to an end in the arms of fate. Every challenge is yours for the taking and every opportunity, the product of a challenge long gone...

I dreamt of my father...

In my eyes, he once must have seen himself. ..and in my he forcefully tries to correct his mis-steps. The older I get, the more of his idiosyncracies become apparent in me. I remember when as a teen, I had sworn never to become like my father. However, nature is inescapable while nurture is only the subterfuge which refines nature. Today, lost in meandering thoughts, I had to catch myself from thinking how much like my father I have become - in looks, in life and "love?" No, it seems that the only place where nurture has stepped in has been in love.

How I wish I were like my father in love...but did he ever really feel fulfilled in love or was his union with my mother one of Africa's post-independence arrangements. Yes, it was love, because in a time when people seldom married across tribes, they did. So who would blame me for pondering the union on my "culture" to another? It would only be the post-global projection of my belief in the power of destiny in bringing loving hearts together. So how different am I from my father again? We may actually belong to the same side of a coin - heads!!

Nostalgic Past meets Bleak Present…

The lines of fate course across his creased forehead, evoking decades of trial and triumph. Graying brows shadow his tired, rheumy eyes which peer at me from a safe nostalgic distance, a distance in his past. My questions drive those eyes further into the emotional recesses of a past to which he willingly returns. Then the words start rolling from his quivering lips. Slowly he narrates experiences steeped in the proverbial wisdom of his time. He savors every word, as though they are invisible anchors holding him to everything he still believes. For, not even the lines of time running across his forehead have dampened his belief.

“You know my son, it is not until the river runs dry that you know the value of its slow journey,” he begins tentatively. Then more assuredly, he lunged into the life of privilege that they once inherited through their colonial encounter with the British. “In the days of British Southern Cameroons…” was the preface to every story. And the tales ranged from the hydroelectric plant at Ombe which never faltered, to the printing press and stores in Limbe which augured a boisterous economic future. Then he talked about the Prime Minister’s lodge nestled in the fog-covered slopes of the great Mount Fako. The mountain, which he still fondly called (like Hano the explorer), “the Chariot of the Gods.”

To listen to him speak would be to think that the colonizers had done no wrong. However, he only lives in a world of comparison where our union with La Republique du Cameroun has bred marginalization and disenfranchisement. As we try to chart a future, the past is distant and the future ought to be the product to constructive creativity.

Stop...Start...Dance

Her hips swayed easily to the deafening beat surrounding us. Lost in the moment, I stared, stunned by her graciously facile movement. I watched her dance at me, dance around me and even seemed to dance for me. I had lost my lead as she led herself deftly through the sensual cadence, wrapped in an impenetrable rythmic aura. She pulled my arms around her and I felt the electricity pulse from her hips. The calypso's crescendoed snapping me from my stupor. Gently encapsuled in her aura, I moved to the beat of her back to my chest, her luscious derriere to my loin, her hips to my thighs and our movement blending into the quintessential harmony of two bodies dancing as one. It was one first dance, it was one last dance. A dance resigned to memory, where it stays peturbed by the desire to recapture that moment.

Information Overload...

Time spent as a ravenous information consumer, takes away from time which could be spent as an information producer. While information consumers expend time kapital in their effort, information producers invest in the potential to gain from consumers. Which would you rather be - an information consumer or an information producer? Before you make a decision, think these roles through from a rudimentary perspective.

Introspection...

Introspection is the fire which kindles our most prolific imaginative consciousness. Kant presumed that "I think therefore I am." However, in thought, we not only live in the present, we also negotiate an understanding of the past... and in thought, we express unbridled aspirations for the future. I find in introspection, the shades which color my every experience.