When You Are in Need

 GUEST WRITER

 By Odimegwu Onwumere

We have been ignorance in this country (Nigeria) for a long time in a crowd of adulating confidence. Just hoping and hoping, yet the ticking of the clock has passed beyond our timing. 

When did our country become the haven for the skeptics or cynics? When would we have the men who can dream of things that never were? According to Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

Those people we have in mind that could come to our assistance when we are in need, many a time, disappoint us. Surprisingly, it is those people we least or never thought of their cooperation that would beckon on us when they heard our plight. This is why we should not despise anybody, no matter how highly or lowly placed we are.

This world is such a terrible place. Sometimes your friend’s laugh could mean your undoing; your father’s pity could mean your death, and so on. Envy abounds both in highly and lowly places. Your boss in the office would always want you to work tirelessly, but may not want you to grow. He may not want the people in your network to explore and find the potentials you are made of. He could be tarnishing your image before the Director of your company. But before you, he would feign loving and caring.

When your boss is praising you so much, please watch your back.  And when people are not criticizing you, please watch yourself; you may not have been doing well. You need to understand the country we are: Somebody is more concerned with his or her toothache than the earthquake that raked Haiti. The world people are so selfish that one may ask if the world is a product of selfishness. Friends, like brothers and sisters, are titular. Your success and failure depends on you, only you alone. But you need someone to help you, no matter that the human nature is full of greed and envy; although, hardly do we accept this individually.

While one knows that the best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he or she wants done and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it, one also knows that the boss you are fighting hard to seeing that he succeeds hardly have the time to appreciate you.

It is the lack of this appreciation that has made many wives absconded from their marital homes, because hardly do their husbands appreciate their efforts. We forgot that what many see as a ‘common thank you’ has saved lives and nations, yet it is the hardest word in the mouths of many people, especially those who feel you are under them. This could be why one Uzoma K.L. Nnabuagha said: "Life is simple, do not make it difficult." But how many people care about this in our country? When they are selfishly looting our collective sweat?

Caroline Kennedy said: “As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need prosperity of kindness and decency." There is no how you could be with someone, so prosperous, without you aspiring to be prosperous too, but the obverse is often the case.

Men would want you to serve them with all manner of sincerity even when they do not have the word ‘sincerity’ in their diary. It's not just enough to be with someone, help the person to grow. There is a feeling of prosperity when the person working with you or you know is growing in his or her own standing while you skyrocket with the unused money in the banks. A feeling passes between you both in the world. Always, you will know that you are not alone.

People talk of God much in our country without first understanding what they call God or think God is. It is not God when the man with you is not doing well, while you are burgeoning with merited and unmerited wealth. Mother Teresa said that, we need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grasses grow in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls….Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

Many of our countrymen and countrywomen believe in the Albert Einstein’s quote that, a table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? Do you ever remember Maya Angelou’s quote? “I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back, said Maya Angelou.”

The character of our men and women have made one to be a student of History, in the eyes of Maya Angelou, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again….The need for change bulldozed road down the center of one’s mind.

While we labour, those people we labour for apply Winston Churchill’s philosophy: “My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.”

Those who feel that they have arrived still need our brains, but not our growth? “Those who know how to think need no teachers,” Mohandas Gandhi. “We do not need to proselytize either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.”

Except in our country, is there any where in the world where the government does not always find a need for whatever money it gets? Do wise men need advise? Would fools take it? It is very sad that some of us eat what we see, and not what we want. “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness,” Dalai Lama. 

Odimegwu Onwumere, Poet/Author, Media/Writing Consultant and Motivator, is the Founder of Poet Against Child Abuse (PACA). He writes from Oyigbo, Rivers State, Nigeria.