falling inside the black

So last week my workmate told me a story. He was involved in a small tiff once with a matatu. The mat hit him from the side, but the driver refused to accede, so they called the cops. They come and look at everything and talk to bystanders and clearly it becomes very evident - the events were open to interpretation, so justice was going to be doled out to the highest bidder. So they drag the mat and my friend back to the station. The mat driver calls his boss, his boss comes and pays off the cops, they let him go. So now it's just my friend and the cops. They tell him they're gonna have to charge him (obviously, coz the other "defendant" has just been declared innocent so by elimination...) Does he think he'll be able to chuck 4K to make all this go away. He's a good Christian, so he said no. Strike one. They take him to court. He doesn't have a lawyer, so someone over there tells him that to make things all go smoothly, he's gonna have to plead guilty, then he'll just be fined for reckless driving or whatever and everyone goes home happy. So he does that. The moment he said, he could tell he'd made a mistake. You know once you're guilty in the eyes of the law everything is now left up to their discretion. You basically no longer have rights. So this prosecutor now says that no, they don't have enough information to go on, they're gonna need to carry out further investigations. WTF!!! The guy pleaded guilty - what more do you need genius??? Anyways, the judge agrees (again, WTF!!!), and apparently also when you're guilty, bail is left up to the judge's discretion. So he denies - or it doesn't come up one way or another (remember my guy doesn't have a lawyer - he was advised it would detract from his image as cooperating with "the investigation" - term used very loosely). So now it's Friday he's going to go to jail till Monday. In remand, they make another offer, and now that he's actually IN jail the stakes are higher - is he gonna be able to get them 15K? 15K and they "lose" the file. He can walk away. He says no. Strike 2. At this point they're getting frustrated. He talks to them about a cash bail and they immediately seize on to this new-found opportunity: they can arrange for one for him, but he'll pay them 10K, then they'll give him a receipt for 5K. Implied in that transaction is, of course, a 5K bribe. He's like, guys, I'm already in jail. At what point are you gonna get it - I'm a believer. I do not bribe!! Strike 3. His wife gets there, gets him a lawyer finally, who tries to, from a friendly-face perspective, reintroduce the notion of the bribe to smooth things over, he tells that lawyer does he want to get paid or not, coz if he does, he won't bring up the bribes again. Strike 4. Lawyer  gets the message, finds another way to work with the system and gets my guy out, and then helps him out through the remaining court proceedings.

I gotta be honest here, that kind of (is staunchness a word?) is incomprehensible to me. This guy was willing to actually spend the whole weekend in jail just to stand up for a principle. He got all these opportunities even after having lost hope, and still said no. And what's more, his memories of the day aren't even bitter. He's looking at it from the perspective of the people he met there. "You know I even found some people who were arrested and no one in their families knew about it, I got a chance to witness to them, and when I got out I got to find their people and tell them." So maybe God did intend for him to end up in that cell that day. Damn! I think it's safe to say I've found a real life hero this week. I don't know how someone does that. With a lot of help from the Holy Spirit, I guess, but it must also take some courage. A LOT of courage. I got arrested once too when I was still in school,  and went hadi the cells. I didn't have to bribe anyone to get out. But I really think that had more to do with the fact that it didn't come up (a friend came and talked to the boss for me about us being only students and stuff, and lucky me I actually had my uni ID that day). If it had, I don't know what I'd have done, because believe me when I tell you, no one wants to be locked up in our Kenyan cells. 

I usually try and listen for that still small voice, and sometimes I hear it, but sometimes I can't tell the difference. You know, between what it's actually saying and what I think it should be saying. Especially in many of those, what you'd call, grey-area situations. Maybe I was supposed to hear that story. So I'd start asking myself these questions. If that incident had happened to me, and I'd been on the right to begin with, I think I would have found a way to rationalize my way out. I'd have told myself I shouldn't even be there, and isn't this one of those exceptional situations, like white lies? And I'd still have been wrong and I probably would have known it, but that wouldn't have stopped me. My church launched these things called real groups today. Basically home churches. I'm supposed to find one and join, and ostensibly they'll be able to help me work through some of these things. I hope that becomes clearer in my head with time. There's a song playing right now, by Hillsong, which I want to be my prayer: "...In my heart, in my soul/I give you control/Consume me from the inside out/Let justice and praise/Become my embrace/To love you from the inside out..."

END

raindrops keep falling on my head

Have you ever fallen from a really high point? High enough that the fall lasted long enough for you to actually have time to look around and think about it? When I was growing up we used to live in these high rise apartments, like our first three houses were apartments, and we always used to end up on the top floor. So kids being kids, we devised a game where we'd sit on that railing for the stair cases and slide all the way down. This one time, I did it with my eyes closed and didn't realize I was almost at the end until it was too late, so I went flying right off the handle - literally. I actually broke my back that day, couldn't speak for like 30 mins, but that's a different story. I'm telling you, the closer you get to the ground, it stops feeling like you're falling, and starts to seem instead like it's the ground that's rushing up to meet you, and so everything happens faster and seems more urgent.

It's like that when the rain falls. Today I did something I've wanted to do for a long time - I stood under the street lamps and looked up, and watched the rain fall. The drops come and they appear to get faster as they get closer to you, and larger too. But when they hit you, it's like all that speed and momentum suddenly vanishes, because they simply disintegrate around you and you don't feel a thing. It's like you steel your nerves for this hit that you can see coming, and then when it gets here it turns out to be a gentle soothing pat. And the sound, the constant din of the droplets hitting the ground becomes like music. It's this steadfast knocking against the roof. It doesn't stop. It creates a beat. Langston Hughes calls it a lullaby. And you actually do sleep like a baby when it rains all night. The rain does bring with it crazy traffic (which is why I was standing in it to begin with), but it also brings with it renewal. Sort of like redemption. Everything shines brighter after it. It's like a new beginning. It's like it washes away all of our troubles, and gives us a chance to start all over again. Well, it doesn't really, but it should. If you're gonna get drenched, you should at least get something out of it.

You know those little streams that form on the road coz of the rain, like little rivulets leading down into the drain? It's not coz the rain falls with such force it breaks through stone - it falls on us so we all know it doesn't. It's not that stone is easy to break through - we need dynamite to do it ourselves so we know it's not. "The drop of rain maketh a hole in stone, not by violence, but by oft falling," said Hugh Latimer. If there's something we can learn from the rain, that's it. Quiet, patient, unrelenting persistence. Hitting at the same spot and keeping on hitting till we find our level. Till we create a path to our own great success. Because after the rain, follows the sunshine. And then comes the rainbow.

END

all god's children

Kid, 9 years old, finds out her father has Huntington's disease. She doesn't know what it is, or that it can't be cured, but she knows God's almighty. So she says a little prayer. "Dear God, if you make my dad better, I promise I'll eat all my vegetables. Love, H." Isn't that something? It's like she's asking him for this incredible thing, and all she's offering in return is she'll eat her vegetables, something she should be doing anyways. I mean, yes, it's hard for her to eat them, she doesn't like them, but it's universally accepted that Huntington's is incurable, so she's basically asking Him for a miracle. And you know what's amazing, she goes to her dad and tells him it's all gonna be OK, she's prayed and God's gonna answer her prayers. Faith doesn't come in a purer form than that.

Maybe we should all have stayed little. It makes it so easy to handle the unknown, when you think you know how it's going to turn out. I'm doing another application. I saw an opening at a place I've come to like, and I went for it. A week ago, so now I have those butterflies all over again. I'm praying for a positive response, and believing like that child believed is, er, kinda hard. See, a funny thing happened on the way to the moon - I grew up. I found out that I can't fly. That my dad can't, in fact, make the rain fall. That if I jump into the river I will drown. That the tooth fairy is, like all fairies, a myth. I read the Little House books when I was a child (I'm reading them again, btw, trynna get back some of that glow) and it seemed so idyllic. Laura grew up in the marshes, around all these people that got her everything she wanted, and no one ever fought with anyone else, and the nature around her was like out of a movie. 

It's like that Faith Hill song:

Before I grew up I saw you on a cloud

I could bless myself in your name and 

pat you on your wings

Before I grew up I heard you whisper so loud

"Life is hard, and so is love, child, 

believe in all these things"

I found mayonnaise bottles and poked holes on top

To capture Tinker Bell

And they were just fireflies to the untrained eye 

But I could always tell

I believe in fairytales and 

dreamers dreams like bed sheet sails

And I believe in Peter Pan and 

miracles anything I can to get by

And fireflies

Well I've grown up so I don't still believe in fireflies, but I am still God's child, aren't I? I can still ask stuff of him, can't I? So I'm asking for this. I'm older now, so I know sometimes prayers can be answered with no. But it's not like I'm coming from the doldrums so even if it comes to that it's still gonna be OK. He's brought me this far. Maybe He's got different plans for me, I dono. But dear Lord, if it's all the same with You, this is how I want it to go.

END

sand in my shoes

Know thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
...
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
...
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;

That's from the beginning of the second part in An Essay On Man, by Alexander Pope. I think the whole thing was supposed to make us stop trynna understand God because we can't, and just accept life as it is (or refocus our attentions to understanding ourselves). Basically, because we're where we are, and not somewhere worse, whatever IS, is right. (Like Morpheus in The Matrix after they'd just come from the Merovingian and he'd refused to give them the Keymaker | Neo: Well that didn't go so well...; Morpheus: No, whatever happened, happened and couldn't have happened any other way.; Neo: How do you know?; Morpheus: We are still alive.)

We're not built to be supreme beings, us humans. We need others around us to validate our status. We need people to put us up on a pedestal and tell us we're just the ones. We need that exultation to come from other quarters so we can believe it. Because each one of us, deep down inside, knows we're not Superman. We know we have many more weaknesses than just Kryptonite. We know we can be hurt in many more places than just our heels. We're hesitant to put ourselves firmly in any category because we know; we know that we're far from being excellent. When we really look at a mirror, we can always tell, we may have strengths but we have frailties as well. We may have faith and hope, but we have limits to our capacities as well. And over the years, these shortfalls build up over each other, and they weigh down on us if we think about them too much.

I have a brilliant, eclectic mind, but I'm not Steve Jobs. I can write code, and create websites and learn new languages on the fly, but I'm not Idd Salim (I know him from high school - his views rock, btw). I'm funny sarcastic, but I'm not Chandler (or Leo from The West Wing). I'm a hunk (read tall dark and deadly, yes rockhead, I insist!) but I'm not whatshisname. I sin but I'm not the Devil. I play guitar but I'm no Carlos Santana. I have a pure heart, but I'm not a saint. I'm a good person, but I'm not an Angel. When I walk, I dono how it happens but I always manage to get sand/little pebbles into my shoes. And mud on my trousers if it's rained. I've even contemplated tucking them into my socks sometimes, but that would be unseemly.

I'm peculiar in my own way. I guess those little differences are what makes me who I am. I can't swim like the Dunford brothers can, I can't sing like Eric Wainaina can, I can't play music like my brother can, I can't analyze world events like the Tinman can, I'm not as kind as some of my friends are, I don't love unconditionally like my sister does, and I'm not as good a christian as Nancy is. I can never remember to comb my hair, or cut my nails. I cannot stand people messing with my stuff and misplacing it; I sort of have CDO on that (it's like OCD, but the letters are in alphabetical order - like they should be) I don't remember birthdays, and I don't know how to pick gifts for people, even people I "know really well." I'm selfish and I'm impatient, and I'm difficult to deal with at times coz it's my way or the highway. 

I'm imperfect. I'm human. But I'm happy. Being happy doesn't mean everything's OK. It means you've decided to see past life's imperfections. It means everything sucks and you're still doing just fine. Life becomes precious and more special to us when we look for the little everyday miracles and get excited about the privileges of simply being alive. Because when I take a step back and really look at things, I see how amazing life truly is. And that maybe, just maybe, I like being unperfect. Because that way, there's always a better place to aspire towards. There's always room at the top to improve. It's the most beautiful thing about the uncertainty: when I'm not perfect and I know it, I have nothing left to lose. Then I'm not afraid to try. Anything's possible. My fate is not cast in stone. Hope springs eternal.

END