I am one of those seemly bizarre people for whom the New Year is going in a defective direction already, those peculiar people my best friend would call “Pessimist” with derision because they did not write a list of things they want for the New Year or a longer list of things they do not want.
I have watched optimism become brittle mid Year, like hairs plucked from the underarm, I have watched it twirl to ridicule before breaking, before crashing to the earth. So that my friends who said “I will buy a car” at the beginning of the year, taper it down to “I will buy a bicycle” midyear and “I will just buy something, next year is for me” at the end of the Year.
And so, I have ceased to make New Year resolutions. I have ceased to believe that I could be one thing for 365 days and another, the next, or that I could do only some things these 365 days and some other the next. I like to think that my life is a sprawled out sketch and my aspirations run like colours into one another.
Therefore, thinking of life as this sequence of 365 days limits me, limits my aspirations. I do not have a laid out plan for 2016, because I do not know what echelons of my ambitions would be fulfilled, I think placing these aspirations within the limited yardstick of 2016 is like shredding an expensive trinket to make a fitting coat for an infant rather than sprawling it unscathed over a bigger person.
This of course does not make me a naysayer, teeming with negativity like the man who presumed a city was on fire only because he saw light grew smoke or the cynic whom your Pastor would warn you to stay away from because their ill beliefs could corrupt your “Faith” and water down the “This year is my year!” That you had chanted at the Cross Over service.
I am rather one who now knows that every year has been my year, who now believes that my dreams are bigger than the year, bigger than 365 days; I believe that they are things that would always come true, irrespective of time and space.
I know now of a God who does not count his fingers until January 1st 2016 to release good things to me, I know now that good things have always been mine. That they were granted to me right from the day a Pastor prayed over my petite figure stretched out on a marble altar and the women from our Parish had joined in singing, “Come and see what the lord has done”.
So 2016, its fine that you tow me around this early, that you are so eager to teach me lessons in difficult ways, its fine that you jeer at me with previous years when I sleep and say as neighbours to an abusive man would about his unlucky wife “He has not seen anything.”
I like that you are teaching me the atypical but vital act of being an Adult, that you tell me, it is to smile when I am conked out, and broaden my shoulders when I can barely feel opulence in my shirt pockets.
I like that you tell me It is how I look the world in the eyes when I cannot see, and how I strap and unknot my sentiments with ease so that I can laugh when I am poignant and scroll through Facebook in reckless abandon.
It is how much I keep to myself, than how much I tell people and how effortlessly I walk away from ill news.
You are teaching me in so short a time about the best person called “Me” and that the only expectations I strive to meet should be that of this best person. You are teaching me the rare act of “Not Caring”, of shoving love and emotions beneath a pile of books, of doing what is best for me and not what others think is, “for in the end”, you say, “it is I who would live with me for the remainder of my life”
You are teaching me that “The Future” I had always heard about as a child is here already, for it is no longer this distant place teeming with uncertainties and in which I am this better-quality person, but rather this present place occupied by familiar faces.
It is a scarier place than in those stories, for when I heard people say, “Plan for the future”, it was easy to think that it was this place that went according to plan. It was easy to think that it was the puppet and planning the limp strings pulling it and that the only price I had to pay was planning.
Of course, I was not told that plans fall short, that they are as tentative as the youthful Novelist who starts a story without knowing its end and can thus go in whatever way the wind blows.
2016, you are teaching me quite early that plans fail, like straight lines becoming irregular, that they are not coupons to the market of life, or free passes to its concert, yet you are teaching me too that because of who I am, somehow, somewhere, those lines would fall in pleasant places.
I know, I just know.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Caleb Somtochukwu Okereke is a Nigerian writer and literary blogger born. His poetry and short fiction have been published on the Kalahari review, African writer, Quality poets, Teenageaye magazine, Birmingham’s-New Black magazine amongst countless others and in the Texas based journal-The Hamilton stone review.
