MAD RUSH

For the past few weeks it seems to me that everybody seems to be in a hurry. In a hurry to finish what we are doing, in a hurry to get where we are going to. Nobody seems to have the patience of May or June any longer. When I asked myself the most important question ‘Why’, it then dawned on me that ‘time is up’.

I have noticed that naturally, in any examination, people seem to ‘take it easy’ in the first half of the exam. Everybody seems to be relaxed, trying to understand the questions, contemplating whether or not to answer which question, getting mad at the examiners for setting a particular question they do not understand and so on. The atmosphere is usually cool at this time. However, things change when the invigilator calls out that you have thirty minutes to go. It is then we seem to realize that we are really taking an important exam and we need to put up something substantial that will give us good grades at the end. When the invigilator calls out again that you have fifteen minutes to go, you can feel the tension in the room; palms go clammy, people will pens to fly and hate them for not cooperating. We will ourselves to achieve what we have failed to achieve in the past one or two hours of the exam.

When time is up, you finally hear different interesting comments like ‘the time was too short’, ‘if I had an extra fifteen minutes I would have finished that paper’, ‘the questions were too tough’ and so on. The irony however, is that while others are giving excuses for not completing the exam, others are happy that the exam was a piece of cake. I ask again ‘why?’ Is it that the second set of people is smarter than the majority? The answer my friend is NO. I remember my Dad used to tell me then ‘If you walk when others are running, you will run when others are walking’.

We all set goals for ourselves at the beginning of the year; with all enthusiasm we set deadlines but instead of acting on those goals, we go back to sleep, resting on our oars until one day we wake up, check our calendars and realize we have two months to go. Then another day we wake up and realize, one month to go. It was then the truth dawns o us - time is up and hence the mad rush.

We cannot continue to live our lives like this year in year out. That is why I have made up my mind to deliberately start acting. In his book “Where are the Goals I Set”, Sam Obafemi said ‘Enough of Planning, Start ACTING’. Let us join hands in this purpose to starting acting NOW. We have planned all our lives but have not acted enough. If we start NOW we can redeem the following years and find that by this time next year we do not have to be part of the mad rush. 

Let us act deliberately act and live life intentionally- life is not a game of chance.

Extra Time

December is finally here. A month we all anticipate with mixed feelings; some welcome December with joy while others do so with dread all for different reasons. A few weeks ago I was privileged to be on a group that was reviewing a book “Where are the Goals I set?” After the review session, several things dawned on me. Whatever feeling we have at the end of the year depends largely on how much of our set goals we have achieved so far. Most times, we all set high and beautiful goals at the beginning of the year only to realize as the year comes to a close we did not reach our own cut-off point.

Just today, an analogy of the year dawned on me. Each year can be likened to a soccer match. There are eleven players on a team and each player has the responsibility  to make use of the time given, lessons taught, experience gotten to bring home one result – a win! One thing I've noticed so far is that tension in the ninety minutes of the game is almost never as high as it is in extra time (dying minutes). And I ask myself the question ‘why?’ only to find out the same applies in life.

Let’s say the first eleven months of the year are for the eleven players on a team.  We apply ourselves to achieving our set our goals in the first part of the year but most time it seems we don’t apply ourselves enough and start to rush in the dying minutes (December). Since it has happened again this year, I made a resolve, take the lessons I've learnt this match and apply them to the next match. So for next year I put in all I have from the first minute so that by December I don’t have to worry about a loss.  Just like Paulo Coelho said, “it isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present, it’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.” 

Let's make the resolve together, let's start working NOW to make TOMORROW different. We CAN!