“That Thing is Your Soul.”

Z,

Everything seems urgent nowadays. Things are always “fundamental” or “defining” or “definitive”. There is a monumental consequence to every temporal act or decision and things are “irreversible” if we do not heed the clarion call for change or reform or “drastic action.” It is not that these things are unimportant, especially in the here and now. As a lifetime lefty, the material condition of earth and earthlings weighs heavily on my red and beating heart. I do not think there is any virtue in poverty, oppression, or the stifling experience of authoritarian regimes, even when they seem to come from religious sources. The human soul is made for liberal purposes, it is made to choose its own way and no state can love or control that precious thing you own for yourself, can be a substitute for God and those highways of the universe, or effectively cure the maladies inherent in the individual by draconian edicts.

Yet, there is nothing about an ending that can be gleaned from all of human knowledge. We have very educated guesses and theories and, perhaps, a “definitive” scientific framework about our origins on the blue planet but we are not fully able to decipher where we are going with any certainty. No one can go into the future and tell us. No one has come back from the dead and revealed to us if there is a veil between us and what we might call spirits. We are all acting on the strength of the things we most strongly believe in.  We must be humble enough to say that. There is never only one version of any story. We are having an experience. Let us not make it law that we know all its utter ramifications.

I think of these things this week because, in the year we are in at this point in time, we are days away from a political outcome in our country. It is not the outcome I wanted. There is no one on the ballot I truly believe can take us in the right direction which is funny because there is probably no one off the ballot that can do the same. A country is a sum of its little movements and turns. I am one of millions of Nigerians and my preference in a political process is as non-definitive as the idea that there is nothingness after all our experiences have ended. I cannot tell the future. I cannot come back from the event, wiser after, and tell the tale of what could have been. I only have the now. I only have my honest effort. And, as that wise woman of song once said to my heart, I only have my soul. So do you. My love.