When the house has people, we crave privacy but when the house is empty, we desire company.
When food is cold, we request that it should be heated and when it is served, we fan it to cool.
We celebrate the dead. We even borrow to contribute to their ‘befitting’ burials and travel distances to pay them respect, yet live in perpetual rancor and disharmony with the living.
When we build a house, we are happy to have turned into a homeowner, but we have only paid bulk rent for the remaining years we have to live.
We spend fortunes on marriage ceremonies and soon after, we ruin everything in acrimonious divorces.
We defend and talk so much about our religions and their exclusivity in the search for godliness and peace, yet evil and unrest keep increasing in the land.
We spend more time outside our houses than in our houses. Our expensive clothes, jewelry, and accessories, spend more time in our wardrobes than on our bodies, yet we lavish more on them than on our BODY that is supposed to enjoy them.
We desire a truthful society but detest those who speak the truth.
We speak gleefully about dying and taking on eternal life, science also says dying is a characteristic of all living things, tradition equally agrees that everything shall die. Yet we fear to die.
We build tall exquisite mansions in our youth and climb to their pinnacles to relish our success, but desire simple bungalows when our limbs weak and frail, can no longer climb.
Today we are bosom chums, tomorrow we are bitter foes for negligible causes.
We love to gather together but sooner than later, we fight and divide.
We seek to protect the environment and other creatures, yet our own sustenance depends entirely on the incremental decimation of the environment and feasting on other creatures.
Is it these opposites that sustain the struggle in the universe or are they setting the universe apart? Will the universe continue to double-speak or are we the ones that must reconcile the opposites to attain a better nation and a healthier world?
I settle for the latter!
A very good morning to you. Wishing you all the best for the weekend.
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.