I am a damaged man. I need to repair my damaged soul, mind and body. Whisperer, my friend and muse said that I must become a warrior to regain my true self; to regain my destiny, to regain my self-esteem and to regain my stolen soul. But I am lost. How do I start? What is the key attribute that will catalyst this change of destiny? Who are the enemies that I must shoot? Who are the opponents that I need to draw swords with? What? Are the opponent’s people, things, lifestyle or cultural and material burden?
The Whisperer has whispered again! He said that I should be a fighter pilot in order to regain my damaged psyche? Then the picture of a fighter pilot dropped into my subconscious. A proactive, thinking, courageous, fearless, strategic and merciless fighter who selects the target, time, place, the altitude and the correct angle of attack. A superman, supercharged mortal of supreme ability, who could go into cat and dogfight in high altitude like a fixed winged angel to drop sortie on challenging and troubling spots in any time zone. The whisperer again: check your challenging and troubling spots are begin to drop sorties on them. Clearly, the whisperer is overreaching himself with that inane idea. What? I have no challenging and troubling spots. All my life, I have worked my destiny to the bone to live a perfect lifestyle. Until…Yes, until one hot afternoon when my neighbour, as garrulous as ever, perforated the bubble of my pretences.
With exact prescience, he knew that I was chasing the wind of perfection, which, to his sane mind, was futile. He said that he would have loved me with all my imperfections but he not because of my obsession with destructive, narcissistic love for faultless living. Interestingly, I hate my talkative neighbour solely because of his imperfections, which ironically, are the things he would have loved me for—–my imperfections. Then my phone rang. It is as expected, my earthly muse, the invisible whisperer. What again? Like a peeled onion, he began to reveal his teary, wicked self. He told me that he is a deceiving angel who had held my life to ransom for all my adulthood. He is the angel who cloth me with all kinds of colourful, deceitful finery of an impossible chase after perfection. He belongs to the class of angels called soul eaters who inhabit the realm of false perfection. We deceive people to live a saintly, legalistic, self-righteous life which is a sin before God.
We ensure that man is given to work out life’s difficulties through his own limited faculties instead of relying on the potter to mend an already broken vessel. We make the mortal, imperfect man behave like an immortal, perfect man. He confessed that he had damaged, battered and stolen my soul from birth. I hung up the phone and began to cry. Then I began to see my life in the frame of a Nollywood motion picture. Then I began to see the lightless futility of my sun-clean spirit; my clinical moralistic lifestyle, the slow steady descent of the self-deceived in the cruel hand of a wicked angel who had been pampering me with devilish care but offering me false illumination. When I emerged from the esoteric shower of enlightenment over demonic pretences; when my veil of century of mystification was removed, when I absorbed strength over my weakened composure, I realized that I had been brutalized beyond belief.
Hope you got the gist of this piece? The subtext of this illumination is bright enough for the spiritually discerning. As we began the New Year, there are yet many imperfect souls rushing into the error mill to grind out perfect resolution for the New Year. There are those who are inclined to jump into the deceitful hand of soul eating angels in their chase for perfection in a universe of imperfection. Yes, our soul longs for perfection; it longs to do the right thing at any given opportunity. The letters of yearly resolution will not bring about that dream state of faultless living. The secret of perfect living is to die daily. That ability belongs to the superhuman monks who live in the caves of Himalayan Mountains. We are all fighter pilots. We shoot at and we are shot at in a competitive dog eats dog world. Our in-air victories are controlled by God and not by those deceitful levers that drop our sorties, in most case, on wrong targets. In life, we all have to climb from low to high altitude and back again.
So, hey dude, fetch me my Tattinger, get me my Gucci, find my Ngozi baby and throw me my weed. It’s an imperfect world, ol’ boy. Unawamsaying! Happy New Year .
