ROAD TO BEING OLD

“I do not wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions.
Only a short respite from cares and sorrows, a brief time of flowers, music, love, laughter and ecstatic tears”.
      -  ANNE REEVE ALDRICH
“An Evening With Calendar”

Growing up is like a long sail, a journey that starts from the day we are born. The race to be born is by no means an easy task, triumphing over millions of sperms was a race and so are the travails we are soon to be faced with. The arrival of a new born gladdens the heart of all and there is merriment in the air to usher in the latest addition to the family.
From hand to hand you are passed and with a face beaming with smiles, you are cuddled, no one tells you even if you can hear that this is only customary and you are in oblivion that at different points in time, the wrinkle-faced oldies looking at you with mouths void of teeth were once welcomed just like this. No advance warning of the guerilla warfare that looms ahead.

 Gradually, days go by and run into weeks, weeks into months and months into years. As an infant, you are yet to come to grasp with the languages being said in your immediate environment and so the only language you engage maximally is your cry. Those days when you make the days longer and the nights shorter for your mother by your occasionally annoying cries.
  Had you known what lies ahead are still grueling, you would have probably saved enough to last those periods when they come calling but Alas! there is no designated post as an ‘infant counselor’, seems infants now gets orientated even before they are conceived, quite evident from the number of minutes it now takes them to suck to satisfaction, will you blame them?, that’s enjoying while it lasts because future goodies don’t come in containers as inviting as a breast.
Everything you ever desire is provided for by your parents, atleast within the scope of what their income dictates. We are soon to find out that things aren’t meant to continue like this forever and that life isn’t at all a bed of roses.
In a short while, we begin to socialize and learn things consciously or accidentally. Those days when you might have to receive the network of a hard knock on your head just to drive in the fact that ‘2 + 2 =4’ and that the mystery behind the transformation of two identical figures into an entirely different single figure isn’t none of your business. Those days when it’s a hard battle remembering that letter ‘N’ comes after ‘M’ and not ‘O’ before ‘N’. Days when your writing was like a sketch of what happened on the battle field of World War 2.
Jeez! here we are. Those smiles that welcomed you then are now frowning at your mistakes, the hands that once cuddled and rocked you to sleep are now in the form of a clenched fist bent on driving Elementary Mathematics into your iron-forged brain, moments when your tears which used to cause mum shorter nights might only call for the service of a ‘pankere’ or hot taps on your behind….Oh, you thought those infant theatrics were going to last forever?.
Then from the day care, you get into the nursery school. Even at this point, you are yet to fully understand why you are in school, once thought to myself ‘maybe they feel I’m too stubborn and being home would do nothing but create problem for them’. Well, the interesting part of it was that I always get to use the swing at break times and play without supervision unlike being at home and I didn’t see myself trading that for anything.
We probably felt slightly the same, no future ambition then or what would you expect from a 2-3 year old kid?, well even at that, mine wasn’t close to an ambition because I wanted to be like Jackie Chan and I could remember those days when I had to mimic his fighting ‘swags’ after the end of a movie.

‘Holiday is coming,
Holiday is coming,
No more teacher’s beat………’
This was a song I always eagerly anticipated, whatever it’s written on the end of the term report card wasn’t what I would lose a sleep over. Felt it was only normal to go away from home, then wait till the term ends so I can be on holiday but I was soon to prefer school to being home on holidays.

Back to our discussion, From the Nursery school, you get to the Primary school.
Double promotion isn’t hard to come by here even though you have to earn it and show the school that they are ‘dulling’ you by using the same syllabus being used for your peers for you too. As you mature from class to class, gradually you understand that the higher you go, the tougher it becomes and that your report card would come to be the testament of how good or otherwise you have fared. We fantasize a lot and it’s no surprise that many kids savour being a soldier, pilot and an astronaut combined. A topsy-turvy situation you would say.

From here, you move to the secondary school and your future ambition begins to take shape in the form of the courses you opt for in the Senior Secondary School.
You start being aware of the opposite sex and your appearance starts becoming of importance, that topic in Biology makes it the more interesting and you just so much wish the teacher could skip all preceding topics for it. Those times when wrapping your arms round a girl for a photo shoot was like holding a molten magma.
 Most people write their first love letter at this point, I wrote mine in SS3. Took me over 4 foolscaps before I got satisfied with my antic because any cancellation by me meant that another foolscap would have to be torn, needed a very quiet place at the corridor of the hostel. I didn’t sleep until 2am, that’s the sacrifice I had to make, afterall whatever is what doing at all is what doing well.

And though JAMB mostly poses a stumbling block, we soon gain admission into the tertiary institutions and that’s where the real life begins.
Here, you discover what self-reliance is truly all about.  You would be faced with 3 choices, you can choose to be serious, semi-serious or none of the former.
You can be as intelligent as Einstein, if 4-5 years isn’t complete, there is no graduation neither is there a thing like double promotion.
Intimidation and peer pressure isn’t hard to come by here and in order to keep up with happening trends, being a ‘yahoo guy’ might just be the only available SOS for most people or if your parents aren’t that rich that they can afford miscellaneous expenses, how will you satisfy these campus girls whose curvy behinds, uphill acropolis and inviting physiognomies are mostly meant for the highest bidders?
You are bound to experience so many things reminiscence of what lies waiting in the outside world. Your heart would be broken, so also will you break people’s heart and so on.
Regardless of what you graduate with eventually, everyone once wanted a first class but with the various CGPA ‘leg-over’, digging and trimming, you soon give up and resign to fate…who says 2,2 don’t make it is always a ready consolation and you soon begin to use Bill Gates as an example ‘afterall, he’s a drop out nau!’.
You atimes get lost in the ambience of the moment, forgetting you won’t live on campus forever and that you would graduate someday and be saddled with the responsibility of fending for yourself and starting a family. The labor market isn’t at all friendly.
The realities of life gradually dawns and you relish those moments when you were an infant, where you had all the cares in the world, never thought a moment like this would come?.

Starting a family isn’t much of a task as fending for them and sustaining it or what’s hard in putting a girl in the family way if all external forces are disregarded?, just joking anyways .
Then you have children, then grand- children and God willing you are able to see beyond that.
The point where no one might really care about your silence and when you cry, your grand –children would be stunned and wonder the reason behind it. The point where you would start behaving like a kid once again that even your grand-children might get frustrated with your attitudes. The days when those cat walks would turn to snail walk, that inviting physiognomy would have gotten colonized by wrinkles and you take a new born to cuddle someday and think to yourself ‘I was once like you’.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that takes our breath away.
Live your life to full positive maximization, leave no room for regrets and learn from the mistakes of others, you just might not live too long to make them all alone.
So that when you are lucky to grow old, you can look back and beam with smiles knowing that despite the tides of life, you don’t regret being old.

                              “There is no place in which to hide when age comes seeking for his bride”
                                                                                                                    - JOYCE KILMER.

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