Know the world

Picture this....

You are of the age when you are starting to realize things and make sense of the world around you. You only know of the stretch of land that is visible to your vision as the whole world. You page through glossy magazine pages showing creatures and beings you have neither seen nor heard of in real life. It all seems like make-belief to you because you cannot wrap your mind around a world beyond what you see. According to you, life is about what you know and since you know very little life is not about much, just breathing and eating and minding livestock and heeding nature calls and doing what you can to be naughty while avoiding a spanking. You experience another world for a brief time, so brief that after a while it starts to feel like you might have imagined that world or dreamt it.

Enter reality; you are approaching a standard in school that cannot allow you to remain at the school you are attending and the nearest school with the standard you are to start is far away and is also a boarding school. Some place where your caregivers felt you could not survive and in retrospect, I think I also would not have survived because I was quite stubborn and could be naive at times. They then decide to send me to my sister who lives in a different world to the one I know and with different horizons.

In this new world you barely see forests or hills, you do not have to fetch water from the well, you just twist a knob and like magic, the water comes out. You don't have to walk long distances in the vast open spaces of the countryside to get to school, instead you walk beside tarred roads while dodging cars when you cross these roads and watching out for stray dogs and aggressive people. There is television and cartoons and everything must be paid for, including fruits. No more walking to a peach or apricot tree and plucking to your heart's desire and sitting under that same tree to enjoy the boon. This is life in the township and danger lurks everywhere. There is a possibility that you could get electrocuted, kidnapped, robbed, stabbed, murdered or hit by a vehicle. Life in this place is not for the docile or lame, the semi-alert or the trusting. Here you treat every person you don't know as a potential threat and respecting men who call you or tell you to do things because they are your elder does not apply.

Not everything about this place is bad because you get to learn about how to deal with the harsh reality of life and that benevolence is not innate but a choice. You also discover that the world is so big you can never cover every inch of it in your lifetime and also that there are parts of the world that are not friendly to humans. I grew a lot as a person while living in this part of the world and I missed my grandmother dearly. I used to write her as often as I could afford it.

Today, I take this world for granted because surviving in it has become like blinking. I do it without thinking. I have seen a little bit of the other parts of it and I have plans to visit yet more parts of it...

Peace be with you and thanks for reading.