Life: One Way To Outsmart It

"We can be wiser than life you know."

 Have you taken time to notice how a typical smoker takes a cigarette? Two smokers were together in a place, one asked the other how many sticks of cigarette he smokes a day, and his reply was: “I smoke two sticks and I’m good for the day”. The questioner, amazed, said he smokes two packets a day and that’s not enough, saying he smokes one stick after the other in quick succession. That’s by the way.


A smoker reaches for a stick of cigarette in a pack, lights it concentratedly and when it’s lighted, he draws the smoke in, likened to a person who sighs after a difficult task, puffs the smoke out and waits for some seconds before taking another draw. This process he continues until the stick reduces towards its end where he takes some quick draws; the sticks then reduces to the level where no more draws can be taken and before one says jack, he throws the residual to the ground and smashes it with his feet! And that’s the end of that cigarette stick, and like the other smoker in the first paragraph, he reaches for another in the pack and the process starts again.

This can be likened to how life treats people; life here refers to it in totality: fellow humans, conditions, beliefs, and every other thing that life comprises of. A person becomes rich and influential and the world Identify with him, his riches continues and he becomes relevant, everything goes slow and steady, but when he’s gradually getting to the end (either of his life or riches), there’s this buzz all around him as life tends to take the remaining goodness in him before time elapses and when it’s visible that no more can be taken, what happens? You guessed right, he’s throw away and the memory of him his forgotten! A new person his picked up (by life) and the process starts again.

 Life’s so powerful that it cannot be defeated. But how can we give it ‘a run for its money’? Let’s think. The answer is duplication! Duplication in such a way that in a pack of cigarette, it would be just one cigarette but has been duplicated, and when the smoker thinks he’s done with one to reach for the next, alas, he’s just getting started as he’s still taking the same thing. I’ll sight two examples from my environment to explain this.
 EZE EGO 1: this man was famous when I was very young (in my early 10s to be precise). He had money; I mean he was very rich. I remember a friend and I discussed about him then, saying small denominations of our currency were nothing to him as he would throw them away (the highest denomination then was the newly launched 100 Naira note). He spent his money, bought mansions, latest cars, womanized, painted the town red etc; then he died in his early 40s, he has been forgotten from the very day he was laid into the ground. Since his death, I haven’t heard anything of him either in the media or from peoples’ mouth.
 MKO ABIOLA: even after his death, tales are told of him. He was rich, wealthy and generous. He built schools, libraries, hospitals, churches, mosques, roads, to mention but a few; and all these he gave to his people without a charge. To this day, his memory is very much with us. He invested in other peoples’ lives and those that his life affected positively keep remembering him. Needless to say, hundreds of years from now, he’d remain.

 From these examples, the point I’m trying to let us see from the smoker and cigarette illustration should be clear. “Knowledge is to know that cabbage is a vegetable; wisdom is to know that we don’t add it in a vegetable soup.” We should duplicate our lives in this sense even if it’s one extra copy so our sojourn in this life won’t be an ‘open and close’ one.