I HIT THE BOTTOM, GOT BUSY AND SURVIVED.
I shall never forget the day, a few years ago, when Mrs Adekunle Ogunsanya told me a story of her life. (I have not used her real name). She told me about how tragedy had struck her home, not once but twice. The first tragedy that had struck her was when she lost her four-year old daughter. People called her all sorts of bad names (mostly the in-laws), tagging her a witch that she ate up her daughter. Amidst what she was going through, the husband was not helping matters but worsened the case.
Three months later, her husband was sacked from the company he works for…and who got the blame, obviously everything was hurled at her even without no one knowing that she went to the MDs office the next day to cry and plead on her husband’s case.. This double bereavement (rather triple bereavement because obviously she had no peace of mind at home) was almost too much to bear. “I couldn’t take it,” this mother told me. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t rest or relax. My nerves were utterly shaken and my confidence gone. Her friends advised her to take sleeping pills or take a trip, which neither of them worked. Day by day, her body felt as if it were encased in a vise, and the jaws of the vise were being drawn tighter and tighter. At one point, she considered SUICIDE, oh yes suicide! The tension of grief, if you have ever been paralyzed by sorrow and the meaningless of this life, will know what she meant.
Few months and few days, she found solace through her only child a 6 year old son. The persistent little man always disturbed her to play with him, which she was in no mood of. But she gave in one day, and that was the day his toy broke and she decided to fix it. Fixing that toy was the closest thing she had to mental relaxation and peace of mind that had left her for months! That discovery jarred her out of her lethargy and caused her to do a bit of thinking, the first real thinking she had done in months. She realized that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking. The next day, she went from room to room in the house, compiling a list of jobs that ought to be done and definitely getting a real job.
No time for worry! That is exactly what Winston Churchill said when he was working eighteen hours a day at the height of the war. When He was asked if he worried about his tremendous responsibilities, he said, “I am too busy. I have no time to worry”. We all have hit the bottom and had our breaking points, situations we thought we were never going to survive, but guess what? We are here! Congratulations, we made it! Most of us have little trouble “losing ourselves in action” while we have our mind set up and doing our days’ work. But reality always sets in hours after work, oh dear they are the dangerous ones. Just when we are free to enjoy our own leisure and ought to be happiest- that’s when the blue devils of worry sets in and seduces us with their sexy lingerie. Oh well. And then we begin to wonder whether we are actually getting anywhere in life, whether we are in a rut; whether the boss/teacher “meant anything” by that remark he made today; or whether we are getting bald. When we are not busy, nature rushes into our empty vacuum with air of emotions (worry, hate, fear, jealousy, envy and so on). Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful happy thoughts and emotions. If you and I don’t keep busy, if we sit around and self loathe and brood we will hatch out a whole flock of Charles Darwin used to call the ‘’wibbers gibbers’’. And the wibbers gibbers are nothing but old fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and power of strong will. GET BUSY.
VIVIAN NGIGE.
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