FALLING FOR THE SWEET SEDUCTION OF HAPPINESS. – Oluwakemi Omowaire.

There were days when I listened to her as she told tales of those years now stuck in her memory. She told of the evenings when he sang beautiful native love songs to her under the plantain tree. Nights when he pokes her cheeks gently and her face lit up, brighter than a night star. They enjoyed the lush greenery. They enjoyed their walk in the village tiny street roads. Their priceless quiet hours under the moonlit cashew tree. The fresh fruits, the sounds of gentle taping waves on the wooden windows. The tall breezy iroko trees, the fierce night songs of the crickets. The beautiful night glow of the fire-flies, and the clean fresh air that makes the lung smile. The sweet, gentle longings they shared.
My grandma had never had a bubble bath, nor was she privileged to visit the world’s most beautiful beaches. But even if you do not ask me, I love to tell that she’ll die with a smile baked on her face. A happy old lady she is!

No time! Yea, no time to keep sighing into the mirror, practicing sad faces. You can have money and travel the world, and still be so unhappy.
Yes, every human being have the need for a constant, never ending improvement. The air is full of the impatient song for relevance.
And yes, the pressure to increase the quality of our life is so high. The pressure to have a better quality of life for ourselves, for our family, for our friends and our foes.
But often time we let this pressures overwhelm us rather than stimulate us.
The fresh hopes with which we meet every new year is often so high. Plenty new mountain height goals. Fresh ambitions, this and that, this and that. But then tick tock, tick tock, before we can say Jack Robinson or Mufu Alani, the year has slipped by like the soap-slippery arm of a thin child. Then we check the calendar and it’s christmas again. And 8days after, it’s another year. Fresh faith, fresh prayers, fresh goals, fresh hopes.
‘Yes you can do it!’ ‘Yes, you will do it.’ Hehehe! Trust me, it does sound smoother and sweeter in the mouth than it is to actually do the do. Lol!
The easiest part of a dream is the conception. No new beginnings come easily. Even a woman in a labour room bringing fourth a fresh new life into the world has to breath hard. Real hard. Or haven’t you seen a woman in labour pains bring down a wall? Oh, you haven’t? For real? *I blink*
I realized though, that it’s way easier to advice someone else. To say to them, “when things are not going good, don’t get sad or feel down.” I’ll like to say it’s hypocritical. Wait, I mean I want to say it’s isn’t hypocritical. Abi! So, okay, what if you stay sad. Feel down and dead like NITEL, stay awful all you want. What good will that do anyways? Prolonged sadness do not transforms situations.
Am I saying that if you pursue your goals and you meet with initial failures you should feel good about it? Nooo! Mba! Rara o. But we cannot let failure or a repetition of it sink us.
Being happy is an attitude. Happiness is the essence of life.
Some people go through life postponing their joy and happiness. They’ll say ‘someday, after I have been able to achieve this and achieve that, I will then be able to enjoy life to the fullest. Aww! I like your life’s calendar. Or, I mean I-do-not like!
Stop measuring your successes or your failures by your primary school mate achievement, or by the achievements of your mother’s sister’s daughter’s son.
Don’t stop dreaming though. Because dreams keeps us going. Even a lazy man have dreams. Dreams of walking by the roadside one day and finding a big bag of money. And then carrying the bag of money to buy a big car and marry the finest woman on earth. Though it’s a lazyman’s dream, it’s still his dream. Though this kindda dream is better dreamt only in a sleep. Real life isn’t cartoon.
Darling, the road will be bumpy. And some doors will not open even after the thousandth knock. But hey, you can’t approach the next door with a sad face.
Sometimes disappointments strike us so hard. So hard that our dreams become unutterable. And there have been days when realities have pushed us to re-dream our dreams.
I always like to think that my disappointments are truly opportunities in disguise. Don’t look at me like that, yes it helps me stay sane and happy, and strong for the next hurdle. What is the essence of life’s many hustle bustle afterall, if the time you live on earth is sadness laden.
Life is longer than a man’s life, and longer than the numbers of years we live on earth. even if it’s a hundred and twenty years, it’s still nothing to compare with the length of life itself.
If you do not know happiness while pursuing your dreams, and you drop dead before you’re done chasing your dreams and ambition, oops, what a sad story.
Haven’t you heard of the word ‘enthusiasm?’ It fuels passion and releases the juice for persistence. Persistence which in itself overshadows even talent.
Life starts at the time of birth -in an unconscious state, and life ends at the time of death -also an unconscious state, and then are buried in a confined space in the ground, in total darkness. And then for the dead nothing else would matter. Not even wealth, debt, or social status.
Let’s live our best life today. Or what do you think?
Let’s squeeze all the joy we can find out of each moment. For the form and the purpose of our individual journey isn’t similar. Find and be yourself. Living solely to impress others is a difficult assignment. Harder than the hardness of Olumo rock.
So find and keep your joy. Pursue your goals, laugh like a drunk, learn to exhale.

Sometimes I like to write myself a poem. One like this,:

‘I choose to be in tune with my inner man,
For from somewhere I learned it,
That true happiness comes from within.
But though at times I may be like a short-handed child,
And my morsel of food may not always reach my mouth,
Even then, the thinness of a stomach cannot dry out a life that’s got purpose.
Because on my life’s walk, I have stopped by the stream of joy to get baptized.
And then again I learned,
That there are some nights that are brighter than noons.
There have been days that I’ve been tempted to be sad,
But those are days when I laugh out loud.
I’ll laugh at the source of water in a coconut fruit,
And at the many silly things of life.
Even God saw me,
The day I bathed myself with drums of tears,
Because my life is not as good as that of Lagbaja and that of Tamedo.
Little did I know that even Lagbaja and Tamedo have their undergarment of pains,
But they wear it with a smile on their face.
No one has yet arrived in the land called perfection,
Yet another lesson from somewhere I learned.
We all have our different, individual journeys,
For even the prints on our fingers are not thesame,
Why then should our path to fulfilment be?
Happiness is the song my soul has found,
And it will be my fuel as I live one day at a time.

@Oluwakemifully.