The other day I went to buy kienyeji chicken. I insisted I wanted a real kienyeji one. Those fellas at Githurai are very shrewd. They can sell you a broiler that looks exactly like a kienyeji one. Anyways, after giving him a stern warning that if he sells me a broiler I will come back and urinate on all the chicken in his cage, he picked one and assured me that it is the real deal. Without further ado. He grabbed the chicken by the neck and cut its throat. Within seconds he was skinning it (or is feathering?). And within hours I was having dinner.
Isn’t that the fate of human beings? Isn’t our fate the same as that of the cockroaches we kill with slippers? Doesn’t God pick whoever he wants to die on a particular day. And within days we are food for worms? Are we any different from other animals? Eventually, don’t we all go the way of chicken, flies and cockroaches.
Just like animals, we go through life having some good days and bad days. Then one day our lives end. How different is our fate from that of sheep fattened for slaughter? How different are we from crops which are watered and pruned only to be harvested by the farmer?
I don’t know if cows and chicken pray to God for a longer life. But we all desire to have more time on earth. Not to do anything meaningful. But to indulge in pleasure. Like other animals we are driven mainly by our basic instincts of mating and satiating our appetites. Although most of us hope for a pleasurable after life, we are not in a hurry to get there.
King Hezekiah managed to convince God to add him a few years on earth. Given a second chance at life, he decided that You Only Live Once. Deep down we know that there is no pleasure is in death.
A story is told of a guy called Solo who was wise enough to marry several women, only to come to the grave realization that it was all vanity. Solo knew this fact so well that he implores us to do our best in whatever we do. Why? Because where we are headed, there is no action. Only impotence.
The great Seneca says that life is divided into three periods: past, present and future. The present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. We don’t want to think about the past. Why? Because we know we wasted it. The future is really the past we don’t want to think about. So, we are fearful of it. And the present? That’s all we’ve got.
So really, all we have is today. All we have is now. All we have is this moment. What we do with it is up to us. But the owner will decide when our time ends. The crops don’t know when the farmer will show up with a sickle but they flourish anyway.
We are born, wallow in life and then die. That is our common destiny with animals and plants. Even though we turn our back on our fate, we can’t shoo it away.
The story of Simon Makonde really captures the fate of human beings. Born on Monday, named on Tuesday, married on Wednesday, taken ill in Thursday, treated on Friday, died on Saturday and buried on Sunday. Some truths can only be better told through fiction.
By the way, the kienyeji chicken tasted like a broiler!
Life is life.
Fabio