Many parents like telling their children stories of how they struggled with life. How they used to walk barefoot for 50 km to school and how they always slept on an empty stomach.
I like telling the story of how I grew up sleeping on the sofa all my life until I finished university.
Generally, these stories of poverty and struggle don’t resonate with our children who have found themselves having their own bedrooms and being dropped at school.
Curious kids would often ask, why did you walk barefoot for 50 km to school? Because we did not have money. Why didn’t you have money? Because we were poor. Why were you poor? It is at this point you give up on your little motivational speech and change the topic.
Our children have been born in relative abundance. And expecting them to appreciate what they have always had is like expecting a blind person to thank you for switching off the lights. Or expecting a person who is already full, to enjoy another plate of ugali.
But if you give a morsel of bread to a starving man, he will not just appreciate it, he will devour it.
Now, before we say “children of nowadays” are ungrateful. Let’s examine our lives for a moment.
If we look at the way we live, we assume that life is something we will always have. Something we have in abundance.
Yet, really all we have is today. All we have is this moment.
Sometimes I ask myself,
If I was lying on my deathbed and I was asked to give an account of my days on earth.
Would I be content with the way I lived?
Would I say that I extracted everything from life?
Would I say that I sucked the marrow out of the bone of life?
Would I say I chewed the sugarcane of life and left the remains so dry that it can light a jiko?
Would I say I ate the mango of life, licked the seed dry and chewed the skin of the seed like we used to do back in the days?
Would I say I cleaned the plate of life dry with my tongue, like we used to do in high school?
Life is life
Fabio