Gratitude Challenge Yesterday my friend the artiste / banker formerly known as ‘Smoookiiing!!!’ now known to the rest of humanity as Aunty Chidimma Obioha Dureke nominated me to take a gratitude challenge. The challenge requires that I pause daily, for the next 7 days, and write three things that I am grateful for in my life, after which I am expected to nominate three other people to take up the challenge. I have accepted Chidimma’s challenge with a slight variation; the pause will be once, today, and I will try and articulate three all-encompassing areas / things that I am grateful for in my life. This done, I will nominate three people I would like to take the challenge. So here goes…. The Gratitudes 1. To Life, it’s Lessons, Freedom and the ability to Give - For Life is a gift from nature which I must say that I grabbed with both hands and enjoy to the fullest and more. For its lessons, learnt or not, are what makes us, definitely why the French Existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, Jean-Paul Sartre opined that we have the power of transforming ourselves indefinitely’. He it was who said that “what we do, how we act in our life, determines our apparent ‘qualities’.” Life and its lessons has also given me the ability to give, so I give conscientiously, hoping that the gifts will not only positively impinge on individual lifes but inspire concentric circles of societies. 2. To the indomitable power of the human spirit - The mostly untapped strength that we all have in our hearts, within our minds, trapped inside our souls, struggling against all the odds that life intermittently throws in our path. For like Sartre I reject ‘determinism’, for it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies. In Sartre’s eternal words, “freedom is the freedom to choose not the freedom not to choose, (for) not to choose is to choose not to choose”. 3. To my family who are friends and friends who are family - I have written in the past that every human being we encounter, whether sibling, friend or spouse, is intrinsically dissimilar primarily because our individual mental and psychological developments are premised on different circumstantial socio-cultural variables. That is why we tend to respond/react to change and the effusion of time differently. Sometimes in life we meet and bond with those who we have significant commonalities with or those in who our dissimilarity become complimentary. This bond becomes even stronger if as we change (because as humans we are all bound to change over time) those commonalities converge….when they diverge we end up parting ways, either peacefully or (sometimes and unfortunately) with a lot of rancor. The ones whose commonalities converge with ours are those who will hold our hands through the vagaries of life and whose hands we are always there to hold. To my family who are friends and friends who are family, I love you passionately (I don’t know how else to love), and will always invest my emotions, give you my all without looking back….to my core; Pat, Kaycee and Kosi; to my siblings; Nma, Chichi, Uchache and Kito; to my FGC Enugu friends; to my Unilag and Theatre 15 friends; to my GT Bank and Access Bank family, to my brothers across Nigeria…to my friends. Phew!!!! Oya, I don blow the grammar finish…I nominate Emeka Ihuoma, my obodo oyibo Dokita Gal Friend Olufunmilayo, and Nnaemeka Osakwe.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 13:02:11 +0000
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