Leverage

One of the best advices you can ever get

Is to stop seeing yourself as a victim

As if you have nothing to live for.

Move on with your life

With the past in the past

While waiting for the future to come with less worries.

As famous as Mahatma Gandhi is

As famous as Martin Luther King Jr. is

Both of them and all other great people

You admire in the journal of history

Are not more important as you are,

For they are not privileged to see this day, today.

Though, they lived their lives

And made a mark in the sand of time,

You can also live your life

And as well follow suit in their prosperous trails

Without worrying about what people think about you.

We all have a fair share of pain in our lives

As it turns out that the one thing common to all humans

Is nothing but the experience of pain.

I, sometime, saw a programme in the Al Jazeera Network titled “Field of Hope”, which depicts the story of some set of women from Congo, Africa, living in one particular place and in a particular geographical area together because of one reason- Stigmatization born out of rape.

These women were victims of rape, some were progenies of rape, and to think that some of these women even gave birth to children (progenies of rape) they live to detest due to the circumstance surrounding their birth. Their dawn and dusk emit nightmare and vanity from the psychological trauma they had gone through. They believe in the futility of life and wish for God to intervene in their predicaments. If you could imagine yourself living like this, how would you feel? What would come to your mind every second of everyday? I GUESS YOU WOULD THINK OF DEATH OR PERHAPS, SUICIDE?

These women experience pathetic days and struggle to survive with the anguish and agony of being the molested apples on the tree of life. And as you read this, some of them are still out there being raped right now, somewhere, with you worrying about someone not loving you enough as you should be loved. You worry about a life that could be tagged a lie because you weren’t being yourself; you worry about not having all you had ever wanted; you worry about anything and everything when the only problem in your life has been no one but you all along.

No matter how you and I see it, our lives are always channeled and determined by us, ourselves. We always want the things not really meant for us; we always go for the chase to succeed when all we need to do is to just wait for the right time to do the right things; we always want somebody all the time to be our guiding angel when we can thrive safe and free ourselves from abuses and attacks by our actions to others and seeing life in a brighter perspective.

However, it is only a joke to think and believe that your story is as dreadful as it can be, when you hear that of a young boy from Somalia who watched is mum being stabbed at age 7 by his dad, out of anger and frustration. How do you see that boy growing up in a society where no one cares about anybody but themselves and how to feed their inimical creed born of greed? Now, compare yourself with such an innocent poor boy and say you face worse than he is facing right now.

Even when misery and waning hopes get to their climax, life does always present us with something(s) to live for. Those things could be found among your loved ones like friends and families, among those that you seek to protect and care for, it could be just there in the eyes of a beggar along the alleyway to your work, or just there within you without even knowing it’s there.

To those women from Congo who has gone through hell and back all in the name of stigmatization born of rape, they live for just one thing. They live to change the story of their tomorrow, they live to tell us that there is love and God up there watching us to just live our lives. They live for HOPE!!!

There are times when happiness becomes a wind that comes and fades away, there are times when nothing really makes sense in life due to dejection and soreness, but the one thing you will ever have when all is gone, and said and done, is no other than the one thing that makes life worth living to that pauper you see out there from your window in the street, HOPE!!!

Even when life’s song loses its rhythms and vibes in your ears and heart, when everyday seems like yesterday fraught with woes and sighs, you still have HOPE!!! When you shuffle your life back and forth to see what has been waking you up in the morning and assuring you of a better tomorrow, in there, you will find love and surely, hope to represent.

Don’t you think it’s high time you had started seeing yourself and your life in a whole new and brighter perspective? Don’t you think it’s time to see that you have got a meaningful and purposeful life to live? I do think and know that the world awaits you at your very best and just when you feel you can’t withstand it anymore, look back to where you have been coming from and ask yourself, Is it worth it to have made it this far?

It isn’t a lie to say when there is life, there is hope and I say when there is hope, you sure have a life to keep, live and improve on. It’s always right there just exactly where you would need it to be, the chance to make your life today better than it was yesterday and even greater tomorrow. All you need do is to discover yourself and give your life a meaning by choosing to live for a just course, significance and a purpose.

Don’t just hope and stop there, dream dreams; have visions; think right; set and pursue meaningful and rational goals; and above all, live your life and always be grateful to those that have brought you this far in life, to those that stayed when you needed them the most and those that left you at the very moment of trials because they made you strong enough to believe in yourself. Just set your priorities straight, value yourself and remember that life is not about the duration but your donation and every moment in your life counts either in good times or bad times. Having a life is always a sure leverage to conquer death, defeat your fears and bring out the best in yourself and others around you, not neglecting the world in totality.

So, be grateful and pleased that you have what others in the morgue or sepulcher crave to have much more just one more time and by what you make out of it will determine whether you are thus, deserving of it or not. YOUR LIFE IS YOUR LEVERAGE!!! And as long as there is a will, there is hope and a life to live.