SUPERFICIAL!

“Vanity dulls the senses”…Nadja Sam

Hello!

I once heard an interesting story about the telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell and patented in 1876. The tale was that the first call Alexander made over the phone was to his wife whose name was Hello, thus Hello.

This was later found to be a hoax, Alexander never used the term ‘hello’ the first call he made was to his assistant who was in the adjoining room and he said ‘come here. I want to see you.’

Alexander Bell preferred to use ‘Ahoy’ as used on ships in those days.

Now that I have your attention, hello, and as a matter of fact, are you there?

We need to say hello to ourselves from time to time perhaps to jerk us back to reality, because it is observed these days that we are massively distracted by traffic, noise, toys, banality and of course, vanity.

Believe it or not, there is fire on the mountain and I vaguely wonder where on earth we’d run.

Each day, we are bombarded with millions of products, together with their photosensitive flash adverts, corrupting and confusing our minds, and then we face several types of crisis and choices requiring split-second responses, trust me, that stress you have is real, if not surreal too.

And guess what, the companies that make these products and blow up those adverts in our faces don’t care about us, in fact they quantify us in figures, making us a part of the schemed cash-flow plan as their concern is about the bottom line, even at the expense of our health and lives.

“It reminded him of the truth – who he really was, and the fact that no matter how far he ran, his past would be right there with him ”…Kayla Krantz

Who are we?

Who am I?

Who are you?

Trust me on this one, no one can really tell who we are, scientists have simply taken on the tasks of history, archeology and ancestry just to be relevant in things we pay little attention to.

With no disrespect, we are a bunch of inquisitive, complex, gullible and selfish beings seeking to dominate the world, thereby ruining it in the process.

We rush through the hierarchy of needs like the hydrogen cycle and head straight to the top of the food chain, only to let our egos dictate our actions over others, and ultimately our destiny, thereby altering the eco-system.

We claim to change the world and make it better, but no, we have yet to change ourselves, and let love resonate and illuminate the world.

Who are we?

We are who we say we are. We are our dominant thoughts and actions. We are a reflection and product of our environment. We are who we choose to be; we are what we constantly do.

Beautiful cities usually have beautiful people; war torn areas usually have defensive, insecure and grumpy people. 
Poor nations usually have myopic people. Myopic in this context encompasses greedy, selfish, blind (visionless) people with ulterior motives that amount to nothing.

Who are you?

Look around you; you are who you surround yourself with. You are your parents, friends, leaders and your thoughts. You are the music in your soul, the rhythm in your heart, the love in your life, all you have to do is make it good, for your past shall surely haunt you, whatever it is.

“Blurred is the picture, to not know what’s next! Is it the laughter that awaits, Or sorrows lined up to dictate. Untold, unclear is…A story of our fate ”…Somya Kedia

Next!

I hate to admit my fear, but is it not obvious that we dread the future?

We now live in an age where priorities are lost, kids are spoilt and misguided, gadgets are replacing emotions of humans and we are slipping away from ourselves.

Nigeria seems peculiar though. For us, in as much as it is shameful, apart from the fact that we were born into corruption, it seems normal to be greedy and looting the national treasury and getting away with it. 
We constantly live beyond our means with our streams of income flowing from theft and exploitation that perfectly seems normal.

Currently the world is talking about global warming, autism in children, space exploration, cancer cure, AIDS cure, sports, Prosthetic improvement, Alternative Power and impeccable leadership, but Nigeria is stuck in lack of power, roads, schools, hospitals, employment and common welfare for adults, women and children. 
Not that it is impossible, but we are selfish just looking out for individual interests, which countless models have proven to be counter-productive. Where is the love people?

This is what will happen: If Nigeria does not start to do the right things such as produce what her citizens consume, we may not be relevant to the entire world in ten years time, think about it, even the oil which nature freely blessed us with is becoming a glut the world over, and by principle, the demand is dropping.

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible…”Authur C. Clarke

Beyond Hope!

Hello! Did you say hope? Oh yeah we wish, we are way past hope. What we need is a call to action, with the right measure of patriotism and virtue.

Majority of Nigerians need direction, they need to know that they must believe in themselves, they need to be told and constantly reminded that they can do it, and must do it because they do matter and the nation depends on them, else Nigeria could fall.

There isn’t time, we have to keep talking about it, and act. We can manufacture cars, phones, computers, etc.

We need to convert western books into our languages and rebuild our culture; this is what China did to be relevant.

Hello Nigeria! Wake up; we have slept for far too long.

It is high time we quit the superficial lifestyle and become who were really made to be.

Thank you as always.

Akin Abimbola. (akinzogee@yahoo.com, akinzogee@gmail.com)

Twitter: @akinzogee

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SOURCES: Brainy Quote, Good reads, Google, Quora, Survive the midnight, Wikipedia

This article is an original piece, reasonably researched and contains considerable opinion and a unique style of the author.

The names in actual stories are not real and the stories in this write-up are usually fictional, consequently, people’s names appearing are purely co-incidental, except for quotes and news that are typically referenced.