The lonely hours. You wonder where that nature’s balm, sleep, is. It has deserted you and your upper eyelids are unable to rest on your lower eyelids. You sit at your desk, that shrine for modern man’s contemplation. The computer screen is blank. You gaze up at the ceiling. You hear the night birds making their presence known in the neighbourhood. It is the hour that witches and wizards meet in the groves before riding off into the night on their brooms. You do not hear or see them but you know that somewhere, far or near, they must be feasting on the uncontaminated blood of babies.
And then you find your mind wandering. And wondering, trying to understand life and its woven matrix of mysteries. No, this is not about the witches and the wizards. It is much more than those frightful denizens of the night. It is about life and its capacity to toss us up and down and from side to side, forcing us to clutch at the straws in despair and desperation.
We were brought up to believe that success is a thick wall we build around us to protect from the inclement elements of human failings. As your mind drifts, you find yourself wrestling with the question: Does success guarantee anything in life? You can easily measure your success by your quantum of money sitting in bank vaults in the financial capitals of the world. You can measure your success in life with the position you occupy in government, business and the professions. And of course, you can demonstrate where you are in the pecking order among the successful with the toys of success: a gleaming private jet; state of the art motor vehicles; designer jewelleries and a stately mansion or mansions in choice cities around the world.
The cultural lesson is that wealth, the great social divider, makes you immune to the ordinary failings in life. You cannot be a servant; you can only be the master served by a horde of servants at your beck and call and willing to minister to all your whims and demands, no matter how unreasonable they might be. Yet, in those lonely hours, when your mind is free to drift away from the lies served us by our politicians and business moguls, it begins to dawn on you that wealth is so weak in interfering with your destiny that it cannot make you immune to the failings decreed on the human race by its creator. It can take you up and it came bring you crashing down into the deep and leave you wondering what went wrong. You ask questions but you receive no answers.
I have done a bit of mathematical calculation about this and came to the conclusion that success is not supposed to be permanent because failure makes success possible. Failure is wired into the DNA of the human race. And so, no condition is permanent. No success is permanent. No failure is permanent either, although it often feels so. Whatever you attain in life can be lost in the time it takes to say, lord. Everything in life is fluid. Each level of success creates fears about the next whirlwind you are likely to sail into.
You begin to understand that neither your wealth nor your position on the social ladder of success can separate you from nature’s signature, the DNA. ***The mighty fall and the wealthy are suddenly given a place in the comity of the poor sods that form the ladder on which others climb to the top of the totem pole. Men and women joined together in holy matrimony find themselves apart again because what God joined together has been put asunder. The marriage of the wealthy fails just as that of the labourer ends quite often at Mushin customary courts in Lagos.*** Life.
Here is what I chewed on only last night. Perhaps you have not heard of Jeff Bezos. Well, he is the richest man in the world. When you think of the many rich men such as Bill Gates and our own dear Aliko Dangote, you would understand how high up he is among the richest in the world. Bezos has some $137 billion sitting in his bank accounts. Bill Gates trails behind him as number two with $92 billion. No chicken feed, of course. These scary figures make no sense in our native tongues. Or even in our local currency.
Bezos is the founder of Amazon, the online information and market place. He is only 54 years old. He and his wife and their four children live in the real laps of luxury. Each of them can have a private jet. Each of them can live in a private home equivalent to our own Aso Rock Villa. If his wife and his children lack nothing, would you not expect a happy home filled with fun and laughter? With that kind of wealth, would you not expect him to be protected from the ordinary failings that afflict the Ajegunle husband and wife subsisting on eba and soup in want of meat?
How then do you make sense of this? Bezos and his wife have gone their separate ways, as in divorced, after 25 years of, as the bible would put it, being joined together. What, I asked myself, would make two people who lack nothing, miss the glue that binds one man to one woman? I am sure the wife could not have complained of lack of feeding and house keeping money. I am sure she could not have complained of being kept outside the loop among the bejewelled class of well-coiffured women because Bezos failed to splash a few careless million dollars on the latest show of wealth and class among women of wealth and class. It cannot be that the wife wants another man because she cannot find a richer man than Bezos. It cannot be that Bezos feels that there could be a more caring woman out there than the one he had lived with for 25 years and fathered four children.
So, what happened? Well, to put it simply, the wealthy also cry just like the poor man in Ajegunle living in a makeshift contraption he calls home; his castle, no less. Life is equipped with obvious mysteries that pass all understanding. We rise and we fall for reasons we do not understand. You cannot find answers to the dark mysteries in the lonely hours of silence punctuated by the songs of the night birds. You can only find yourself asking more questions such as this: Is it the the fault of the individual or can we blame it on the nature of the human society?
Think of this in a larger context. Individuals fail; so do nations. No fortune, personal or nation, is permanent. Think of the many empires that exposed their emperors as mere mortals in starkers. Think of something as big as an empire crumbling like a pack of cards. No one knows why.
As you engage in the endless struggle to move on from one level to the next in life in search of success, remember that life is a bit of a joke played on the human race by the author or authors of life. We win and we lose because we are all pawns on the chessboard of the indefinable thing called fate.
Take it easy with yourself, I say.
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