I started writing this article in January 2022. Imagine. It is now December 2022. I’m embarrassed to admit it. But it is what it is, so how about we try to finish it this time? Alright, walk with me.
Mine has been an interesting life. I keep being told I should write a book, but i’m yet to acquire the patience for it. Plus I think the best or better yet, more interesting chapters of my life are yet to occur, so why rush it? I don’t think we live one life, despite what the Gen Zs would want us to believe. I think we live many lives, weaved in together so intricately we can barely tell the beginning of one and the end of the other.
But we try. That’s why we make such a big deal about Birthdays. Or new years. Or new careers. Or new marriages. Or pandemics. We seem to crave anything that signifies an end and a beginning, whether we admit it or not. Talk to anyone right now, and somewhere in that conversation will be something along the lines of , “2022 has been such a <insert adjective> year for me…i’m praying that 2023 will be <insert another more optimistic adjective>”. Trust me, i’m drinking from that Kool-aid too. Who doesn’t want a chance at a blank slate? Come on.
Allow me to get a bit philosophical, or try to. It might fail, but bear with me. Life, in my opinion, is a sum of two things; experiences and acquisitions. At 35, my experiences have shaped my values, my beliefs, my fears, in many ways my very essence. Let me give you a for instance. This year we changed Churches. I’ve been a roman catholic all my life. It shaped most of my early life and dictated some major life choices. Like my getting married early. Or not being a dead beat Dad. I’m not saying if i wasn’t Catholic i would have made different choices, but being catholic did heavily influence those choices. Still with me? Ok. But then I turned 30, and having acquired a bit more information about life, via more experiences, being a roman catholic wasn’t cutting it anymore. The dabauchery on Friday/Saturday, Church on Sunday routine wasn’t cutting it. Eventually i just gave up Church all together. Then Pandemic. Then online church, you know the rest.
2022 comes, and i’m ready for some church outside a screen. Bidi bada boom, i found myself in a protestant church. Eleven months later i can barely recognise my previous self. The experiences of the last few months have been nothing but surreal. In instagram lingo, Church has finally Churched. This experience will highly likely shape the next few years of my life.
Next, acquisitions. You know what they say. Money runs the world. I was born into plenty, but could only enjoy it for some 5 years before it all went up in literal smoke. Tribal clashes happened. Faced with the choice of leaving it all behind or watch his family burned to death left my Dad with very little choice. The next 15 years were tough. My parents had to make do with quite little, and bless them, they did well. Or should I say, they did their best. I had a roof over my head, food at the table, and the eight or so schools I attended as the experimental first born were quite the adventure. I had no idea how humble our existence was. I mean, how could I? Everyone I knew was in our socio-economic class. Life was great!
I remember the first time I got a sense of things we didn’t have was when my mom took us to visit someone from Church. I think Ma was in the said person’s Wedding line up. So there we were. Me, and my three siblings plus Ma. Back then we lived in what was called a ‘Ploti’. If you don’t know what that means ask a friend. This person we were visiting lived in their own compound, complete with a private gate and everything. They had a car. A car! I can’t remember what make, but it didn’t matter. They had a car! We were welcomed into the living room and i couldn’t keep my mouth from gaping. Compared to our sparsely furnished living room, these people seemed to have so much stuff it threatened to collapse the floor. The couches were so huge all four of us squeezed into what was supposed to be a single person seater, before my Mum spread us out to avoid embarrassment. That was the first time I watched a coloured screen TV. The show was Mr. Bean. I’ve loved it since. Before then the best i’d seen was our Landlord’s black and white TV which we could only watch surreptitiously through the Window when his daughter allowed us. No no, don’t feel bad. Remember what I said, my childhood was swell!
I remember in Class 8, my Dad conjured up the courage, and the means, to send me to a decent Boarding school. That’s when I truly started appreciating the value of ‘things’. What they did to you. The courage they gave you. The high self esteem. The friends they earned you. The confidence. The ‘oomph’. We all knew them. The kids who showed up every term with brand new uniforms. The ones who sneaked in snacks we’d never heard of. The ones who’s parents showed up on visiting day with what can only be described as a motorcade. This charade continued in high school. Some of us would run out of our meagre pocket money by week two if we didn’t spend it wisely, yet these humans would be at the canteen 3 times a day, rarely eating the barely edible food we were served at the Kitchen, and never seemed to run out of money. The fact that most of them always appeared in the bottom half of the class exam results lists, and were always in some sort of trouble with the school administration didn’t seem to change anything. Me and my endless string of A’s would have still traded places with them anytime, if only to get a shot at the girls they ‘hooked’ up with.
You get my point. Acquisitions shape us. A clear line is drawn when it comes to money, and you can’t debate it. The haves and the have nots. Simple. When I bought my first Car, a sleek Nissan that would flood the market two years later, life changed my friend. When I moved to an upmarket neighbourhood, life changed some more. I just needed to mention where I lived and all of a sudden the kind of parties I was invited to changed overnight. People say don’t let money change you. Nonsense. Money will change you. Or at least the kind of life you live.
At 35, with the awareness of power that experiences and acquisitions hold over me, I find myself in a state of constant discernment. Because guess what, soon this life i’m living now will pass, ushering in the next one with no warning, and all I will have to take with me into that next life will be the person I became thanks to my current experiences and my current ‘things’. It’s like a universal law. You cannot separate yourself from these two things, try as you might. Even secluded monks are subject to it.
The ‘hack’ if you so choose to call it that I have uncovered is what the article headline above tries to insinuate. Before experiences, before acquisitions, that moment when I stepped into this world and yelled my first curse word, my identity was already defined. I was named at source. Everything that came after that was an attribute, not an identity. Travelling the world gives you the attribute ‘Globe trotter’. Making a tonne of Money gives you the attribute ‘Msheshimiwa’ or ‘Boss’ or ‘Bill gates’. Inventing something gives you the attribute ‘inventor’. It would be a mistake to confuse attributes with identity. My No.1 value is authenticity. I’m convinced it holds me true to my core identity, only unearthed in moments of stillness and meditation, away from events and things.
So say it with me, ‘I was born great. Experiences and Acquisitions are only a means to explore and exercise that greatness‘.
