Life is difficult. That’s the first sentence in Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a book recommended to me by —without mentioning any names — David G, one of the older men I like.
Life is difficult, it says. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
I bring this to your attention gentlemen (and the ladies who just left to powder their noses) because I have been wrestling with some crisis of meaning for the past few weeks. I know, I know. It’s always a burning house in this column. But I promise next week to write something positive, even though everyone and their grandmother knows that positive thinking is the downfall of civilisation.
That said, we were having lunch with David and another friend, Paul, a bloke who is expressionless on average and nonchalant at best, wearing the appearance neither of triumph nor elation, but simply the look of a man on a long journey, one who has come too far to turn back now. But right there, in communion with them, I was thoroughly challenged.
Most of my life I have grown up doing the classic Houdini act, which is pointing my finger at other people. And if art does imitate life, then you can see it too from the way the President has been moving, Kenya’s man numero uno, who is never at fault, always with excuses from Sugoi to Shanghai. The President may not take wine, but he sure enjoys whining. Ama nimekuja sana?
In that table there were three generations of men: David the Baby Boomer whose generation has felt the brunt of my finger-wagging; Paul, a Gen Z whose fashion is best described as non-existent (and I speak for the majority); and of course, there is me, the millennial – always angry, always complaining about something and whose idea of a revolution is to start a #Kenya Vs__ war on Twitter, which I still refuse to call X. If we drew a Venn diagram, some of our circles would diverge, others intersect. The point I am making is this. At one point or another, every man comes to a fork-on-the-road moment when he has to take personal responsibility for their life and choose a path.
David, wise and wizened by age and experience, didn’t offer us any solutions. He didn’t show us the path in the woods. Contrary. He said he is in the woods with us. I found that illuminating because one of the things my generation complains about (here he goes again) is that we want a path laid out. We want a strawman to attack, an effigy to burn, a cause to rebel. The disillusion to Gen Z’s delusion.
This may not be the cause, but it is the trigger that got us aptly dubbed the “anxious generation.” But life is difficult, I am reminded. Maybe our biggest problem as men in this society is that we expect life to be not. But it is. So what’s the antidote?
Personal responsibility. If you keep running away it will become a habit. When I was a boy, about 15 years old, my father owned one of those local video shops.
I’d wake up early and pretend that I was cleaning the shop, but all I wanted to do was watch one of my action figures; be it Commando or Rambo or Steven Seagal with his sexy ponytail which deserves its own Head of State Recommendation seeing that we just dish these awards to anybody anyway.
No girl, not even someone’s daughter can wear a ponytail like Steven Seagal. But what I enjoyed watching was Rocky, a film written by Sylvester Stallone in three and a half days (there is a story of how Sylvester was rejected because he wanted to star in that movie but a) we don’t have enough word count and b) Google is your friend).
Rocky’s nemesis was Ivan Drago. Life is your Ivan Drago, all thundering right hooks, no mercy, and just about pure chaos. But you are Rocky Balboa, trading blows, on the ropes, seeing who would get back on their feet first.
There is a point in the film when Rocky, tired of his son always finding a reason to whine, admonishes him: “The world,” Rocky tells him, “ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you’re hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.
That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not point fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!”
At the risk of sounding like a charismatic preacher offering fridge magnet inspiration, your job in life is to be able to avoid life’s right hand—avoid it, or at least withstand it.
Look, brethren, you are already in the arena. Whether you want to or not. Don’t be the guy who points fingers, and is always complaining, Oh, woe is me! That act is tired, na unatuboo. I’ll share with you some ancient Chinese wisdom passed down from generation to generation that dawned on me while in a bathroom in Kigoma: Whether the frog falls on the knife, or the knife falls on the frog, the frog must bleed.
We get it. Life is difficult. Learn how to fight. This advice is tax exempt and works whether you work at Sabina J or State House, whether you are a resident or a president. Fight.
