Tevin and the rest of us.
University should have been a jolly good ride, but when you spend more than half the school year (every year) at home due to labor strikes it quickly became a long painful stretch.
One year, I borrowed a cassette from my friend, it must have been one of those years the school was shut down unceremoniously and we were ordered to leave campus quickly, or could it have be an occasion of student riots and we were shut out? Don’t remember.
Anyway, I ended up back home with Yemi’s tape and I’d play it back to back, especially when ironing mum’s clothes. Because Tevin was young, there was familiarity in his lyrics.
Fast forward two decades, he doesn’t really make music anymore and I’ve wondered at the turn in life that might have taken him ‘off track’. Too many celebrities suffer this fate, Whitney, Winehouse, Williams. Apparently though, this derailment isn’t the reserve of the rich and famous. Regular Joes and Janes like you and I fall off the wagon every time.
I know people who with just one small unaligned decision after another they veer totally off course. My mum for example was working at the Nigerian Airways back in the day. She marries my dad and stays home to raise a family. When their marriage doesn't work out, she has to 'start over'. She had kids to feed and bills to pay. For others its alcohol, drugs, bad company or gambling that drives them down the rabbit hole.
This pattern in human nature makes my heart clench. I can feel the heaviness of a life unlived across my chest. This scares me. Terrifies me even. Sometimes, it’s just one wrong turn and all the dreams and aspirations are flushed down the toilet.
Some of us are lucky to find our way back, from divorce, grief, poverty, betrayal, depression, debilitating illness or sickness, still, we find our way back.
Even if we had no clear vision of what we wanted from life before it knocked us to our knees, we can come back and create one.
Never too late
We all deserve to live a life of meaning, on our own terms. Everybody deserves a second, third, thousandth, gazillionth chance.
What I see though, is people giving up, drawing the curtain on their life before the show is over.
For twenty, thirty, forty years, they keep saying
“I’m too old. “
“Where will I start? “
“Who will employ me?”
“I can’t go back to school”.
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
Barring any physical or mental handicap, we can be, do and have almost anything we want, the odds in this day and age are stacked heavily in our favor.
How badly do you want it?
Life will continue to test our worthiness of living our dreams by throwing wrenches in the wheel of our progress, nothing valuable lands on our laps without sweat, tears, blood and maybe even decades of feeling lost and miserable.
If you want it, life says,
“Come and get it.”
The only time it’s truly over is as you draw your last breath.
Will it be drawn with gratitude and thanksgiving knowing you gave it everything you had?
Or with regret thinking
“If only I had gotten back up one more time.”
Your Soulsister,
Wuraola