Tales of My Legs - 1

So Samuel Osho has challenged on to write non-stop for 21 Days. Here's my thought-piece for Day 1:

DAY 1
TALES OF MY LEGS – PART 1
(The Unforgettable Days of My Life)

I started out early in life as a budding academic but I wasn’t always so. Yes indeed, I was raised in a middle-class family around one of the quietest neighbourhoods in Abeokuta and had the grace of a modest collection of Euro-bibliographic works and thinking space to revel in my fantasies of life, especially the one about wanting to be a Deejay or an artistic personality of some sort, but though I knew the odds were that I wasn’t going to be one, I was ready to defy the strictures of the Nigerian environment for sure and carve a niche for myself in the arts. Those were my teenage years of identity search.  

I remember how I used to pace the corridor of our dull-coloured single flat loudly reciting quotations I’ve just read from a book or heard from a scene in my favourite TV series, or even mixing new rhymes in my head from poems I just composed or lifted off Soundcity’s top ten countdown. I would also roam the neighbourhood talking about what life holds outside the walls of our fence, especially with the kids from next door. Sometimes we would play all day or watch movies, or do both, completely hypnotized by the surreal world and almost oblivious of what purpose we were meant to fulfill with our lives. I was like every other regular dude in high school, exuberant and naïve, but one fact was unmistakable, I knew I was meant to leave a bright dinge somewhere in the universe someday, so, I never underestimated the place of preparation through the quest for knowledge and prayersa. I loved to read books and listen to enlightening talks. It wasn’t a rarity to see books of different titles competing for bed space with me and it wasn’t too long before the figment, however blurred, of what I would love to turn out as, started to form in my sub-conscious mind – a social creative and academic. Armed with this and many other audacious ambitions, I left home for Ibadan like the proverbial once-lerb

 Fast forward to today, I can say that I’m still nowhere near my dreams, not when there are still few African-descent Nobel laureates, but so far as my eyes can see, I have the world spread out before me. Yes of course, I can boast of some achievements, for instance, do you know how much tenacity and intelligence it takes to be enlisted as one the youngest recruits in a top federal government policy think-tank, or even how much grace and guts it takes to have mentored some of West Africa’s secondary student-geniuses? Yet, I won’t be blinded by such trophies which I daily lay at the foot of the cross, what I would rather do is to keep walking as far as my legs take me, ceaselessly into the future, etching out a unique footprint with each step I take as wide as the ones which Christ has already laid out ahead of me.

These are the tales of my legs. What are yours?

#Day1
#My21DaysWritathon
#WhatisYourMessage?
a  Notice my use of preparation through the quest for knowledge comes before prayers and not the reverse as is mostly erroneously assumed in theory and practice by many people of faith particularly in this part of the world. It was Edmund Burke who said, ‘God has given to us faith and reason, but we have refused to apply reason to our faith’. Actually, I think one should complement, and not supplant, the other.

b  The once-ler is a fictitious character in the epic animation movie –The Lorax (2012) who set out to prove everyone who thought he could not be successful in life wrong. I think everyone who wants a better and sustainable world should see that movie.

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