Live your life the way you want.

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My yeg! My yeg! The adorable beckoning of my 15 months old niece, on whoever can come to the rescue of her foot, from the evil grains of sand that has laid siege on it. She’s totally helpless; her life is an extension of ours in varying degrees. What can she do without us... she’s totally helpless. But I think she sees it contrarily, when she looks at us, she sees her personal cook/feeder, her designated carrier and dandler, her laundry person, her butt cleaner and a whole retinue of staff living to meet her needs. Do we get tired sometimes, yes, are we going to stop, no. Her life is also ours, she’s our investment in the future, she carries all the good traits that poisoned our lives and wields the formula for our perfect progeny, or so we would like to think.

We contemplate her future, the schools she would attend, the sports she'll play (that a no brainer- football), and other futuristic events of her life that are within our control.

In a separate event that happened some years back, 2013 to be precise, I saw a lady; she was in her late twenties, confined to a hospital bed in the female medical ward by blindness which was caused by HIV/AIDS. She was terrified, her despair was palpable, but for the reassurance of her loved ones, which had made her welfare their business, and have temporary put their living on hold to cater for her, I suppose her condition could have been catastrophic, she was going to be transferred to another hospital for expert management but the prognosis was bad.

I read a post on social media the other day, and someone was eulogizing a recently demised OAP and the writer advised readers to live their lives the way they want to because when one dies the world continues and others live their lives the way they want to. I think this statement is flawed. When a child or a youth dies, a lot of things happen, it’s a devastating experience, and a rising star has fallen. The whole world will not stand still because of that but his or her world will, the people linked to her life may or may not recover from this incursion.

Two points in our lives have the greatest involvement of people, our births and our deaths or when one is moribund. As we grow, the involvement that was once called care becomes an imposition to the cared for.  I believe we should always live our lives with an awareness of the interdependence we share with others that exist in our world, which is not defined by the people that live on planet earth but by the people we have ties to. We should remember to reward them for the care they gave and prepare to award our progeny after we are dead and gone with a good memoir/legacy. Great empires were built on this ideological relay, that individual lives can be a conduit for ideas to live on.

It is selfish to neglect, undermine or outrightly deny in words or otherwise implied the emotional, social or financial contributions of people in your life, be it mandatory as in parenting or voluntary, their claims in kind or other to this life. This can be expressed in one simple sentence, its my life or an act of suicide. A symbiotic approach to living is a good option, when we stop breathing we stop living, but our life stays back as a memorial, and to the extent of other lives it touched is to the same extent it lives on. A musician's life is in his or her music, an actor's movies; had an audience at the back of his mind while on set. If you live your life for yourself it will be a fleeting moment, gone with the wind.

Live your life the way you want to be remembered.

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