Continuum in life is nature’s way of taking a huge risk and hoping it will pay off. Everything in life is a continuum. Things happen in perpetuity. Nothing in life ever really dies or comes to an end. Things only change forms. We learned that in elementary science. That matter exists in different forms. Solid, Liquid, and Gaseous, and even more. All forms of matter transform but none is lost.
If a bush is gutted by fire, for instance, all the flora and fauna including the minutest life forms may be consumed by the inferno and look all dead. But the drop of rain and the passage of time will usually produce something better. Even if it were a nuclear disaster, it would only take rain and time for new life to blossom again. The new life is the ghost of the former. They only changed from flora and fauna to ashes, due to the application of heat, and then changed again from ashes to flora and fauna, due to the application of oxygen and hydrogen, (H²O) from rain, over time.
The farmer must also preserve and plant a seed that will ‘die’ in the soil and wait for rain, to spring up a new plant from the carcass of the old. Even the abandoned harvest will fall to the ground, get rotten and die in the soil and wait for rain, to blossom in new form. None of the forms is permitted to be permanent because that will usurp the order of things. So things have to be this today and that tomorrow.
This sequence serves to remind us all that, even if you are a President, a Governor, a General, an MD, CEO, DG, PS, GMD, Minister, Senator, Rep, Union Leader, VC, GO, IGP, Monarch or any other such important person at the moment, take a nap and count how many persons have worn that crown, position, title, rank or privilege, before it got to your turn and how many more are on queue to get there as soon as your time elapse. It is because nature wanted to take a risk on someone else, that is why you got to that position, and that risk-taking doesn’t stop with you. The list after you is endless.
In fact, those whom nature has favored with privileged positions in society have either attained or are about to attain the end of their rising ladder, whether they rose through the rungs of the ladder slowly or suddenly. Privileges abound more at the top. And if you are already at the top, you are near the exit, so that Mother Nature can take the next risk on another person, like she took on you.
Finally, remember that the ladder has two ends; up and down. And like reggae legend, Lucky Dube sang, “Be good to the people on your way up the ladder, coz you will meet them on your way down.” That’s just the way it is.
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.
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