During one of my most lucid moments of meditation, I came across Wallace D. Wattle‘s classic book, ‘The Science of Being Great’.
I have always wanted to be great and successful but was having some trouble with it. So, I read the book. I am always reading by the way. Reading and writing. And there was something striking about it. Normally, I can smell if the author is being inauthentic but as I read through, I began to sense the spiritual depth it had.
Growing up on the streets of Benin City, I have always assumed the government class are those corrupt people who give us fake promises and whom we must elect so they can embezzle public funds and make life harder for us. But this book invited me to investigate another perspective. Much like dropping off my glasses and wearing another just to see if it fits.
The book espoused in detail that the whole purpose of life is growth and that everything is growing and constantly becoming more or renewed. And that even when it seems things are getting worse, they are actually getting better. People need to experience bad governance to know what a good government feels like. If you have never gone through crisis that made you doubt God‘s existence, and the essence of your life, how can you love a more meaningful life?
If you don’t struggle, how do you succeed and soar? Calm waters never made a great sailor. Wherever and however you find yourself, maybe you ought to be there so whenever something great comes, it would find you there. Maybe that relationship was not supposed to work out because someone better was waiting for you. Maybe your landlord was supposed to kick you out, so you can be motivated to build your own house. Maybe you are supposed to be left alone so you can develop your immense potentials in private. Maybe you are supposed to be at square one or ground zero because your moment of elevation is coming.
Like Steve Jobs once said in his Stanford University commencement speech, which I am paraphrasing here: “Life can only be understood by looking backward, but it has to be lived forward. Only upon reflection and when you have gone through your most perplexing and confusing challenges can you ever understand why they happened in the first place. So, keep going and trust that it will all make sense in the end.”
Who would have thought that Edo State today would reclaim its days of theatrical grandeur as we have seen with the current exponential emergence of consistently sporadic, copiously spontaneous and deliberated amounts of creativity?
And pushing that even further, if so much of what I thought was impossible has now become a “Taken-For-Granted-Norm”, it boggles my mind to imagine, “How much more is possible?” Like, where is the limit here? One of my best quotes whenever I want to attempt something that seems impossible is, “Nosa, it‘s not your business to determine what‘s possible or not possible. Your primary responsibility is simply to strive for what you want.” Most of the things that seemed impossible 30 years ago are happening today. Getting a programme to watch in those days was difficult. Today, there‘s an overload of content on the internet that you don’t even know what to focus on.
And that is the reason I set daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals and yearly goals and work on them all the time confident that “if I do my best, God will do the rest”. Anything is possible.
In the beginning of this article I mentioned the basis of my apathy towards government representatives and administrators in general. Currently, my belief is not that they are there to embezzle public funds; I believe they are there to actually help me achieve my dreams.
Aimiuwu, an Edo-born Nollywood screenwriter, writes from Ugbowo, Benin City
