A Million Interests?

Over the past few years I have tried my hand at so many things. I have had interest in so many things. Though some, I did out of necessity. I am a great advocate for saying no to the things I consider inessential. But sometimes I take so much onto my plate.

I now have a blog. And I have also been a bit of a syndicate. I have posted on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and on Facebook. I post some of my articles on Substack though I haven’t been so consistent there. I hope to change that going forward. There’s a great deal of lessons I am learning from Alan Jacobs who by sheer serendipity I met through his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I loved the book for what it untaught me about some of my reading habits; the unhealthy habit of only reading (or wanting to read?) masterpieces. Here’s what he has to say:

While I agree with Harold Bloom about many things and am thankful for his long advocacy for the greatest of stories and poems, in these matters I am firmly on the side of Lewis and Chesterton. Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed. The poet W. H. Auden once wrote, “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit”—for our own personal Christmases and Easters, not for any old Wednesday.

My love for reading is what made me want to be the Chairman of AMSUN Book Club, a job I have turned out to be pretty nasty at; we are yet to have a successful book discussion, and I am quite optimistic. This year, I have been honored, it’s an honor the way I see it, to be selected as the Literature Lead for AMSUN Arts, one of the foremost committees in medical school. I can only hope it goes well. Reading is a passion I would love to share with everyone of my acquaintances, although not always overtly. That’s why I write, so that although I am much the better for it, I may at least draw my readers from their tyrannizing social feeds, even though I am not always successful.

When I became a scriptwriter for Medmic.ke, it was in the hope that I would put my writing to more practical use. I hope to say more on that in another blog post. Later on, I accepted a position in Mastermind Medics Solutions to head the Catering department but I silently bailed out without ever doing a single thing. I am certain, however, that if this was a department the CEO, Emmanuel Wandera, had special interest in its success, I may have to answer a phone call soon; I suspect he is currently busy with other more successful and promising subsidiaries. Maybe it is not so wise to commit an entrepreneurial venture to someone who seems to love reading much more, even if his culinary skills are commendable. During one of our bible study sessions I was a little swift-tongued and said that even though cooking was something I did well, by so many people’s standards, it wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. My roommate later that night warned me against making such kind of comments if I ever wanted to land myself a cooking gig. Maybe I should have said that it wasn’t that I loved cooking less, I just loved reading more. But that would never have been entirely sincere. But with the consciousness that Jacobs has wrought in me about writing being a disappointing endeavor when it comes to financial freedom, may be I am better of doing catering even if I slight it. I alluded to such sentiments, that money can make you endure anything, on my post on suicide.

At some point I tried my hand at online writing, but a few hours into it, no; several hours into it, I noticed I was struggling and I had to bail out, again. I don’t think my client was disappointed in me as much as I was disappointed in myself. It was a great strike to my ego. After all, I was among those who believed that anyone could do anything if they just put there mind to it. I still believe that because while I researched and wrote the assignment, I thought of the hours I wasn’t reading medicine. It’s a wonder why I am never beguiled by such kind of worries when I’m binging a show. After making the phone call and apologizing for the let-down, for days I went on questioning my abilities at being persistent and committed to anything. Thank the Lord third-year got me busy and I got over the failure.

I am currently serving as the Inreach Missions and Evangelism Coordinator for Medical School Christian Union. This has turned out to be a great opportunity to serve the Lord, and humanity as well. But I am grateful for the thrust the post has given me into matters leadership. Yet I still happen to have a dozen responsibilities and things I need to get done before the end of the spiritual year. Am I late? Again?

But when you have a million things to do, can you ever do any of them right? And they are not even a million in my case, are they? I probably just need to learn how to organize myself. Getting to know myself, I have realized, ambitious as I am, my ambitions aren’t like everyone else’s. For example I am yet to understand the big deal my friends seem to have with cars. Now that sounds like some kind of affected modesty, so I will give up that thought. But during our holiday break while I awaited my end of year results, once again by what I believe to be sheer serendipity I happened to stumble upon Dr. Paul Edward Farmer’s story in Mountains Beyond Mountains by Kidder Tracy, and something clicked inside of me as I turned the pages and saw a man do what I had never imagined doing; serving an undeserved Haiti community because of pure goodwill. Here's an excerpt:

At Zanmi Lasante, too, patients were supposed to pay user fees, the equivalent of about eighty American cents for a visit. Haitian colleagues of Farmer’s had insisted on this. Farmer was the medical director, but he hadn’t argued. Instead—this was often his way, I would learn—he had simply subverted the policy. Every patient had to pay the eighty cents, except for women and children, the destitute, and anyone who was seriously ill. Everyone had to pay, that is, except for almost everyone. And no one—Farmer’s rule—could be turned away.

Yes, because of the Kenyan mission to Haiti, Farmer’s story stood out. I asked myself, ‘Are you sure you just want to be a neurosurgeon?’ You will do that for yourself, and probably be happy. But is there a kind of different happiness that comes with making other less fortunate and really destitute people happy? I think there is. Putting a smile on their faces as Farmer did? And since then I have been having ideas.

It’s clear life is not without its sacrifices, but making the right kind of sacrifices is the hard thing. Thirty years down the line, will I be glad I pursued the line of work I did? Or will I regret some of the choices I would have made? Does anyone ever go wrong on not living for himself? Scripture clearly answers that. In the end I probably don’t have to put a smile on everyone’s face after all. But who matters? What matters?

Die We Must, Noose or Not

There’s something freeing about death. Those who commit suicide have their reasons for doing so. Free at last! They can no longer fret themselves bemoaning what another man thinks of them. They also care little of what we may say of them after they are gone, they don’t have to. Disparaging comments from those around us, true or imagined, afflict living souls, but what is an insult to a corpse? It doesn’t mind your censure, neither is it perturbed by detesting. Living requires courage, conscious or subconscious, because you have at some point to face a sneer, answer to a slander, or face a provocation. Suicide demands more courage yet. Suicide means you are desperate enough to end your life despite not knowing what tomorrow has in store. Maybe there could finally be some emancipation, but surely, its likely to be just more of the same; suffering, pain, heartbreak.

When you have a 36-hour shift, and you spend every minute of it on your toes, delivering babies, attending to emergencies, administering meds, writing reports, losing some patients right before your eyes, and thereafter no one seems to be mindful of your plight but instead they opt for condescension and caustic remarks, maybe you can endure twice of that if some money comes with it, but when there is no compensation for all these woes, you lose your mind. And you make that decision that has at least the promise of freeing you.

Others do it for love. Everyday. When someone you love doesn’t return that love, with the same fervor and sincerity, when they instead love someone else, and maybe you catch them during one of their liaisons, which is probably the twentieth, is there a reason to go on living? Why go on living when you cannot have the love you desperately pine for? Dead people don’t need love, do they? Romeos do it for their Juliets, Juliet who it turns out was only asleep, and when Juliet awakes to find her Romeo dead, is their any benefit of one more minute in this vile earth. Till death do us part, only I will kill myself afterwards. What of the guilt that tails behind a mistake. One we cannot forgive ourselves, and so allow no one else to forgive us? When you have done a mistake, one that will not allow the world see you in the same light ever again, or so you think, despite however much they may try otherwise; when you cannot look at the eyes of another human being because of your sin, having your eyes shut forever feels like an escape. That same guilt and remorse hastened Judas to his suicide. What is more heartbreaking than the haunting consciousness that you have betrayed the Savior of mankind.

Some will do all that is in their power to stave off death for as long as they can, yet others actively seek its embrace. Give me something for the pain, and let me die. Jeremiah de Saint-Armour in Garcia’s Love in the Time of Cholera makes a vow against decrepitude. He cannot bear the inconvenience of old age, so he willfully ends his life by inhaling the fumes of gold cyanide. Dr. Juvenal Urbino finds him ‘bathed’ in the scent of bitter almonds. It’s a great way to start a novel:

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

With a suicide. But you are wrong dear doctor, it isn’t unrequited love; it’s a man afraid of old age. Maybe it is unrequited love after all, it is always unrequited love. Or maybe mostly. But what would we say of Flannery O’Connor, with a diagnosis that portends the knowledge that you are living on borrowed time? Many a mother will take a bullet for her son and a soldier for his country. Is that suicide? What of the rich man with a great harvest, with the intention of building more barns, only for the Lord to claim his soul that night. So whether I have a smile on my face today, or whether I have driven you crazy in love, or whether you party yourself stiff, or whether you eat a morsel of whatever for supper, or whether you are caught cheating in an exam and your face paints the web, one fate awaits us all. Some of us are accomplices with that fate, we get the noose and we buy the poison. Others don’t want to consider the thought that this world is not their home. But death is the wave that washes upon every human shore, whether we wish it or not. All men must die. And we are men.

I don't love my wife anymore

I am afraid, and I believe rightly so, of marriage. Love at first sight has been, for a while, something of peculiar interest to me. Though, finally, and for my own good I believe, I have come to the point where I no longer believe in such a thing as love at first sight. It is easy to love someone today, and tomorrow, but to love them everyday for the rest of our lives, that is something for which most of us are entirely incapable of as long as we continue to think that love is just a feeling, and nothing more. I agree with James Dobson that there is no way we can suddenly love someone we have just met. We can admire them, we can be spellbound by them perhaps, but we can never love them, truly love them, in the literal sense of the word. Love requires a kind of commitment that at times bids us to make sacrifices we never foresaw, and maybe that is why couples fall out of love, because if people can fall in love, it means they can also fall out of love. As long as we continue to misjudge, and misunderstand love, the divorce rate will go on rising.

Fiction perhaps expresses the idea of falling out of love more 'beautifully'. I tried it in my short story So This Is Love. In Garcia's Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina Daza falls in love with Florentino Ariza, and then to our heart-rending disappointment falls out of love with him, only to fall in love with him again five decades later. Love! you protean thing.

Here's a passage from Jane Eyre, as Jane tries to explain to Mr. Rochester how he will go from loving to detesting her (I am not sure if it really is detesting, but I think so) and then perhaps he will like her again. Like her, not love her.

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,—a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,—like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master."

Or maybe Fermina Daza never loved Florentino Ariza a second time, she probably only liked him. We will never know.