On Life and Living

The future we plan so much for, we may not even be part of it

I find this title ironic. I played with the idea of “On Death and Dying” and felt it may be more fitting, before I thought better of it. I am writing for the living, not the dead. So the title stayed.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel from Unsplash

By now, you must have heard of the Air India Flight AI171 crash. (I hope you have, I hate to be the harbinger of bad news). It is the worst news I have heard this month, and probably this year.

People are different, they say. So we react differently to bad news. In the films, people scream and faint. In real life, I like to imagine that they, like me, still in shock. But that’s not all I did: I ran out and got myself long bars of chocolates. No, not to celebrate. Don’t get me wrong. It was just the opposite.

Come closer. Leans in a conspiratorial whisper.

I hate to admit but I stress-eat (but if you put a gun to my head and ask, I will accept immediately). Trust me, I do not indulge often—not for my lack of bad news, although I wish that was the case, but mostly because Chocolate is quite an expensive taste. Don’t you agree?

I got this one nonetheless. The news numbed something in me and birthed another. Numb and Dare, two completely contrasting words existing side by side. It made me want to throw caution to the wind and live. Just live. I didn’t stop there. I did everything I had been procrastinating, and every other possible thing within my reach that I could. I took them seriously, and did them judiciously, like I would die tomorrow. Because I could.

God forbid, of course.

But you just might.

You see the future we plan so much for…we may not even be part of it.

Nothing broke me more than the news of the family in the flight moving on, I suppose, to greener pastures. The mother, a doctor, had just resigned to join her husband in UK. Together with their children, they packed their entire lives into boxes, planes and eternity. Before then, I like to think that they would have sat down in the dark, after dinner, maybe waiting for electricity to come on, and talked about their dreams. Their hopes for this new place. There would be mourning for what they would miss—this familiarity and warmth of home. There would also be excitement for all the opportunities taken for granted there. They would have regaled themselves with stories of this future, feeding off their imagination, and filling in the finer details from the films they have watched. If this house looked a bit like a typical Nigerian one, then there would be mosquitoes and them slapping themselves to fend them off. Of course, the story ends well with a slap, a clap, a cheer.

I like to think that the parent(s) would, long after the children had slept, sit down to make more serious plans. Weigh school options. Book accommodations. Make calls. Move accounts. More plans. Big dreams. More plans. I can’t even begin to imagine how much these plans cost. If it were that cheap, I would have travelled around the world by now. And finally, the D-day arrives. They are giddy with excitement. They take a selfie to immortalize this moment: the dawn of a new beginning. You can see the children. They’re smiling. The parents, even wider. And suddenly they are not. It ends before it has even begun.

They are not the only ones. Families. Dreams. Hopes. Plans. Gone in a puff of smoke. I took another bite of chocolate.

As I chew, I wonder what they thought of in their last moments. If they had time to think at all. If they somehow realized they would die. At what point did they realize? The sole survivor said he heard a loud bang…. Was it then for them too? I circled back to what did they think about. No answer. I swallow.

It is ash in my stomach.

Not to get philosophical. But I am reminded again how it is vanity. Everything! How easy it is to lose what we think we are holding onto.

This is not the only experience I've had leading me to such a conclusion. Recently, I've been cleaning my house. It had begun to collect too much clutter. There were clothes to give out, childhood toys to throw away. Things to let go. Even now, it is difficult to let go of my Barbie collection. I had once fought my brother for it. There were clothes I saved for special occasions that never came and now they are no longer my size. There was a life I kept waiting to happen that never happened. And another that happened.

I am not sure where I am driving to with this myself . I am still processing my thoughts. My grief. And I am writing, processing and grieving. So I can’t tell you anything in particular (this isn’t even the newsletter I planned for you). God forbid that me, a whole me, tell you not to look out for your future. Me?! Chief life planner and CEO of invest-in-your-future ventures. Me that can even plan like 7 people’s lives join my own. God forbid o! So I will just let you make of it whatever you wish. And hopefully, you’ll remember that this future you cling so hard to, isn’t even certain.