Socien's Blog

I feel like I am a character in a game recklessly being skipped through obstacles, hitting some, losing all my vigour only to be saved by a dose of life seconds before I die. After a day spent running on four slices of bread, a day preceding one I slept after eating porridge and so on, I finally fetched myself from a late day sleep and cooked. A pot of a think porridge known as sadza in my Bantu language took the heat before one of the eggs cooked in a tomato soup. Just after I filled my plate I felt myself collapsing to the ground.

I gathered up the remaining energy—merely a negligible reserve in the muscles enough to keep the vitals functioning and the heart beating, I thought—and directed it to my right arm to carry the lumps of sadza to my mouth. After boosting my life with extra minutes of survival, it took me not long enough to bounce back to my daily business. The rise was so dramatic and I felt like a Phoenix.

Life has taught me that as long as you are still alive, there is more life ahead. Take risks and plunge yourself into exertion, as long as you do not terminate your life in the process of trying to deliver there are fortifying ordeals at the end. I have been taught that things happen for a reason. When they don’t, you are not in control. When you feel you they not happening for are reason it means you are not in control.

There is a difference between chaos and controlled chaos, I have learned. I, a starveling, was going through some controlled chaos. I was starving because I needed to have a voice on what was going to be spared at the end of the month and be directed towards capital-raising efforts. Controlled chaos is a war that has no other intention but to impose peace. Again I am reminded of Vagetius’ statement, ‘May he who desires peace prepare for war’.

Starting a war with a desire for peace is the biggest protecting peace needs. Starving with the desire for a bumber harvest is the best seed you can sow. And here I was, reducing myself to splinters, barely eating just to get a mile closer. For I know that the journey to what’s desired is a walk through a jungle with exactly the opposite of the desired. A desire is not in your hands. It is simply a pull factor, a factor that glistens goodness enough to make you forget what’s between the pull factor and the pulled.

I had one alternative that could give me room to raise the same capital I was raising without starving myself. There was a girlfriend, I could have disposed of and stayed without her. But men without an understanding of what a responsibility is, look for alternatives. A responsibility does not care whether you are happy or not to attend it. It is simply a matter of following up on a choice you made before by prioritising it rather than replacing it with alternatives. She was my choice. I had not found a reason to not love her anymore.

I senselessly provided for her needs. I needed nit my senseless pursuits of a better-buttered daily bread to harm our relationship. If anything she barely felt the changes in my money system. But the changes were real.

The changes were mine, not hers. I had to protect her from the pains these changes would bring.

~SubjectMe Personal Diary 06Sep24