Socien's Blog

Just as I was doing my midnight ironing to utilise electricity which usually departs at 4 or 5 am—an invisible hand which I blamed for stopping me from building good habits due to the times we normally have it on the twenty-four-hour chart here—a not-so-rare memory with a usual thought on values took me to an incident happening in 2016. A woman from the village gave me sheets and I remembered this as I was ironing on one. The sheet had been designed to make the garment part of the ironing board.

On that day she related to my mom that it was hard to trim off some weight following her doctor’s recommendation. She had grown up wearing skirts and the culture emphasised that a woman should wear one. In her days as a girl not wearing a skirt in the village would result in her being classified as a “prostitute”—funny to know that we migrated from almost not wearing clothes at all before we were incorporated into the British Empire to this (read a related article).  The doctor’s request that she should do some regular exercises was an indirect call to switch from skirts to yoga pants and run in the morning—thus giving up all her values and society’s biases.

She failed to follow up with the doctors’ recommendations in the rural landscape. She herself had given up on the value “a woman cannot wear a skirt” and its interpretation “whenever she does she is a ‘prostitute’”. But the rural landscape around her had not given up on this value. Her thoughts were “what will they think when they see me in tight joggers running down the road”. She couldn’t do one thing she had approved herself to do because the society, the village, bad not approved it. When one thing is not approved, it doesn’t mean it is prohibited. You can do it without their approval.

In the village, she recalled squeezing her body in the joggers, putting a pair of sneakers on and stopping herself before exiting the doorway. She failed. Luckily, she and husband had a second house in the town where she stayed for half a year after the harvests and before the start of the rainy season. Once in the town, where that value had lost its ground, she began her ordeal. She asked my mom—What if I had no second home in the town?

She was doomed to fail and fail to see it. When values fail one, inhibits one from taking action they do not make her feel like she failed. When values are on the wrong side of the right course of action they fight hard until you forget the said course of action. Values are a source of failure as much as they are of success. It doesn’t take only you values to fail you. Theirs can fail you once you allow yourself to do and think only what’s approved because society approves, mostly, through its list of values.

To achieve success, you need to defy your values that are against the next step and get rid of society’s approval. Society approves when an action or a course of action is tallying with its values. This being the case, some of those who have managed to emerge successful at the end of their journeys defied both their values and society’s. But some were fortunate. They found their values and those of society supporting success before their initial strides towards success.

It is easy to defy the society’s values and cultural expectations on you. It is way harder to defy your own—values that originate from society and the education system educating you and those that come through you learning from your circumstances. Unlike society’s, your values make the core of your mindset. It is hard to see it when your mindset is wrong. The mindset is the engine behind your whole thinking. It sure takes you distances but when it is driving you somewhere wrong you will never see it.

Sometimes we fail not because we are not working hard or willing to work hard. It is even easy to start doing some hard work. It’s hard to give up your values. I am someone out there who could have become a musician. My values told me music was not for me but for people with values and behaviours “worse” than mine. My values fixed me to things where my talent, power and luck had never known. My values failed me. Luck takes to the top those who utilise it. It doesn’t care whether you have so much or less of it.