My life’s senseless demand of progress. My sister is my biggest worry.

It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, I must make daily progress in this life on planet Earth. My life needs that progress at any cost. Sometimes I feel like I am a hostage negotiator and my life is a villain making demands which I am feeling to keep up with. The boring part is responsibilities keep piling up on the other end of my scale of financial abilities. I work hard to sustain the balance but I can’t do it at the very pace I am expected to. I am quickly reminded of a paragraphs in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther:

Distance, my friend, is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision; and we desire earnestly to surrender up our whole being, that it maybe filled with the complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! When we have attained our object, when the distance there becomes presence here, all is changed: we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Recently, in my very own life, I have been raising complaints, “Sir we all agreed that with this kind of money, I will be happier, free in my own rented space” each time I feel the strain. I am reminded that my sister is in trouble, I offer a short loan to her. In thirty days, I am reminded that I should bring mercy in the paragraphs of my jurisdiction and cancel all the debts. Two weeks later, I am reminded to bail her out of more financial troubles and I am wondering how. Besides she is the only sister I got. She is no longer laughing at the calls as she used to. These days when I enquire about her okayness. “I will be fine,” is the answer I am getting.

I propose that I fund her travels so that she can meet her boyfriend, suspecting that she is worried the distance can ruin it. She brushes off my offer. I learned from her status updates that our late dad is now making up more than 90% of them. She is stuck. It has been nine months now. Us the boys went through sorrows and accepted that we have been dead since the day we were born, that those who congratulated our parents at childbirth failed to see that we don’t intend to stay. We are here on Planet Earth on a limited tenure.

I remember, in one call, revealing how my trying to protect her makes me poor at managing my relationship. I might write in diaries claiming that I am being manipulative, giving my girlfriend highs and lows to make her love me more. The truth is in those lows, I am trying to walk out of the relationship. I somehow feel that when I do and since my girlfriend is 15% of my monthly expenses, I can have a lot to spare and make my sister happy again. My girlfriend on the other hand is strong. She can’t let me go.

It seems I haven’t failed to share my piece of cake with both young women. I do it at the expense of my financial breakthroughs. The more I try the more they seem to be more and more depressed. I don’t have to investigate what is wrong. Sharing a piece of cake that is close to nothing is. The assignment life is giving me is to double my finances as soon as possible. I am somehow moved by what James Broughton wrote in his Seeing Light, “By all means try all means.”

But I don’t have a working reference book. I have tried to find answers by reducing myself. Recently I joined a security company which decided not to pay me as agreed. I had no option but to quit the job. The question remains. How to keep up?

I am again back to the same rulebook by Broughton which he intended to be a communion of the Brotherhood of Light, makers of cinema light would share among themselves. An eye “creates what it sees and destroys what it does not see.” This said, I reason, if I choose to see nothing in this life of mine but a crisis my life will be a crisis in did. I am only learning to manage this crisis as a system.

A concluding proverb in Broughton’s work makes me think I am a genius in the making since I started to take the proverb seriously: “Genius is not having enough talent to do it the way it has been done before.” I wake up, I realise I have no rules to follow. Mom keeps pressing that I should call Billy and get a job. I decide to go the other way around. I am a genius. I will have methods of my own to deliver whatever I am required to by this plain life of mine.