A new year is an end to a past most people want to forget and a beginning to endless possibilities that most people want to remember. The anvil on which we beat to shape our plans.
It is a trick we all play ourselves into. There is a great chance that you will wake up in the same house you slept in the past years, you will go back to the same job, you will have the same spouse or partner, and you will pay the same bills you have been paying.
In imagination, it is a whole new experience. In reality, it is just a flipping of time.
Maybe move houses, start new businesses, or chart a new financial path, but it has nothing to do with the calendar. In fact, it doesn’t require a crossing over for you to make certain decisions or get to certain places in your life.
It is just a way you have embraced tricking your mind to believe that for certain things to be actioned, a monumental time flip must take place.
What however is undeniably a truth, is that as we turned a new year, the old one ebbed away with great lessons.
Here are a few armchair lessons.
The World Cup
The most valuable lesson we could take from this event is that you could be anything you want. You could be Morocco—a team nobody paid attention to before the start of the tournament—and walk all the way to the semi-finals. Grit. Resilience. Determination. You can be anything you want. You could be a tournament favourite and then fail to make it past the group stages.
The other lesson here is that you make the rules(mostly). Do I need to expound this after all the rules that the host nations subjected the avalanche of hundreds of thousands of visitors to? This tournament might as well have been the greatest learning convergence of the world this year.
Politics
Do you remember days after the August 9, general elections when a red carpet was rolled down the flight of stairs at KICC? A moment of aggregated national tension and worry. Sitting beside your social media accounts thumbing hashtags and trending topics?
The take-home here was, things aren’t as black and white as they appear. A big chunk of life presents itself in grey. Your eyes can play tricks on you. Your friends and people you know will trick you into believing things.
While the jury is still out there even after the conclusive verdict on the winners and losers of that election, another lesson to learn is that people show you what they want you to believe.
They tell you what will excite and sit well with you. That the truth is fluid to so many people. Viscous. It flows where it is tilted to. The truth is malleable, and many people are in the business of hammering the truth to suit their imagined realities.
We may have also learned that lightning can strike the same place not just once. We saw people who had lost other elections win in this one, and people who had won previous elections lose this one.
People who had tried many times before still lost. Others won. Lightning, if you observed, strikes where it wants to strike. The frequency of previous strikes in one place is not a determining factor. In the end, a new regime came to power.
The Queen is dead
Weeks after that regime came to power even before the ink on the assumption of office chatter dried, the queen of the United Kingdom died. Long-lived the queen—and this is not a figure of speech. It is an experienced truth. The queen died. And our new president was on his way to the UK to attend the queen’s funeral, lending credence to the popular colloquial expression mouthed by Kenyans on social media, kupumzika ni mbinguni.
Time moves, and things that require, nay, demand your attention happen like clockwork. You don’t have enough time to say, “but I am new in this office, I can’t just start with attending funerals.”
No. Life doesn’t afford you the luxury of laxity. You hop into the bus (no pun at all) and move with it.
Memes
I learned that memes are a great human invention when former president, Uhuru Kenyatta talked about them at a public function.
If you are asking what they take home from an amalgamation of images and words—the main content of memes is—I think I can explain.
I learned that there is always a lighter side to everything. Something you can laugh about even in very dark places.
When the queen died, it was to many people, a sad thing. Moods were funeral (again, no pun). But there were humans popularly known as meme lords that found a ray of light they rode on.
Over and above these, I end with a line from the poem Desiderata, “it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”
