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Listen keenly, look deeply and think critically and you will understand life.

Comparison

We are created unique with special attributes. By comparing oneself to others is an insult to the creator of life and auto-injustice!

Injustice and Unfairness

If you expect the world to be fair with you because you're fair, is like asking a lion not to eat you because you don't eat lions. It has taken me three decades to understand what the world is all about….a place of injustice and unfairness. 
 I have come to reconcile with the fact that Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win.
But the most important is to take the lesson to the future

COLLATERAL THINKING

Collateral thinking is the ability to think laterally while concomitantly respecting traditional thinking and having regard for conventional wisdom. Most of the world’s population has been brought up to think conventionally. A few are lateral thinkers and a little less are collateral thinkers.I am a proponent of collateral thinking!.

Lateral thinking is a prerequisite to innovation and a condition sine qua non to invention but usually encounters fierce impedance at the start/ during the course, almost so that most of the times, the ideas of lateral thinkers hardly ever go beyond the neurons  that conceived them to  come to light. This is because as one of my teachers used to tell me:

Deviate from tradition, Say something new…. and no one will like to listen to you! Try to convince anyone to accept and you will just be hated….even if everyone knows deep in the sub-consciously mind that you are right! This is human nature! Don’t or never force anyone to abide to your idea, convince him /her to look at his/her own ideas from a different angle—your angle of vision…this is collateral thinking!

Lateral thinkers are idea developers endowed with the ability not only to see at a distance but also to see rightly whereas collateral thinking is the mindset needed to take the idea everywhere.Collateral thinkers  are clairvoyant visionaries ; they are fighters not affected by controversy and  with a positive mindset commendable to be trusted. They believe adversity happens for them not to them and explore and exploit every situation they find themselves positively. They have the ability to change negativity into positivity.

Conventional thinkers simply respect and follow the rules!

Collateral thinking is thus a subtle way of incorporating and blending “lateral thinking-” into “traditional ways (the usual)” without causing friction between schools of thought. Everyone stays within his comfort zone, considers his/her idea as contributive but sub-consciously accepting the new way! Esene 06-06-2014

To which group do you belong? Traditional, Collateral or Lateral?

The Power of Negative Thoughts

The reality of life is that everything we see when we look and hear when we listen represents just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger picture. This affects our thoughts and the way we think greatly affects our body, mind and soul. If our thoughts can affect even the microscopic texture of our tears (see photos), then imagine what that can do to our bodies as a whole, not to talk of our souls. Furthermore, our thoughts affect our beliefs about ourselves and about others. Although the science of thoughts leaves much to be unraveled, the baseline is “our thoughts greatly impact on all the components of our lives”. Positive thoughts about ourselves, about others and about our environment produce an overall positive effect on our lives, so as do negative thoughts. Negativity is self destructive, propagates exponentially faster than positivity and usually leaves irreparable physical and spiritual sores and indelible scars. Like begets like. Positive thoughts beget a positive life.

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Disproportionate Effort and Reward

During my two years of obligatory medical service  in Ndop, Cameroon,  I saw men, women and children toiling and moiling under the hot blazing sun and cold chilly nights beneath the ngoketunjia hills yielding a harvest which I may term "infra" optimal. I used to wonder and ponder if the negative effects of rice cultivation in the Ndop plain didn’t surpass the benefits (“exaggerated!”).

I saw children dying from anaemia secondary to malaria - the stagnant waters (of Bambalang) being the niche for the transmitting vector the anopheles.This gave Ndop the reputation of being one of the regions of the country with the highest prevalence of malaria!

I received teens with hernias , young ladies with backaches from recurrent muscular stress and strain while working in the rice farms.

Ironically, most of these farmers never had enough funds to pay their medical bills nor educate their children because of the inefficient methods used in rice cultivation. My impressions were much effort was put in without a commensurate output! Rice cultivation was mostly for subsistence- much man power used, much time invested, much natural resources (land etc) used for meager output! But whose fault?

Frustrations of Technology

Many great discoveries and inventions of the world were done long before the era of the smart phones and computers; when men used the abacus to count, feather quill pens to write and the ability to read was a privilege of a few. Then men had little or no knowledge about the earth which was believed to be flat and to be the center of the universe. There were no airplanes, no phones and satellites were inexistent. Yet more than 80% of today’s existing knowledge was built-up during that epoch.
Despite all the advancements in technology today, the world has been unable to trace the Malaysia MH370 plane that went missing since months. In spite of today’s acclaimed technology, the world hasn’t been able to track down a group of unscrupulous Boko Haram extremists (Nigeria) holding hundreds of girls hostage since weeks and tarnishing the reputation of one fastest growing economy of the world.

The above two scenarios are really exposing the limitations of today’s level of technology. It still beats my imagine how an object as large as Airplane MH 370 equipped with the most sophisticated chips and a crowd as huge as 300 girls cannot be traced and tracked. This is also a reminder of how vulnerable we are today! It is time to go for alternatives rather than comforting ourselves that we are surpassing the age of technology and moving into the robotic age! 

What a world of technology!
May be we should resort to African magic, the African technology…..to be continued!

Determination

In real life, there are no perfect persons, there are no perfect places and there are no perfect times. At any time at any place with any person, give in your best and make the best of what you have.Life is a dynamic process and no condition is permanent. 

THE IDEAL LADY AND THE PERFECT MAN

Why on earth will a man suddenly fall in love with one and only one Lady from billions of women? Why on earth will a Lady choose to live the rest of her life with only one man from the millions on the surface of the universe? An avalanche of attempted responses have been advanced to answer this challenging question but one of the most plausible explanation goes thus……..
A fortnight ago I was privileged to listen to an eloquent speaker who cumulatively and concomitantly enjoys the prowess of being one of the most celebrated scientist of our times. He suggested that the answer lies within our sub-conscious mind. After perusing through my flood of thoughts, I concur with this.
As a human evolves from childhood to adulthood, (s)he progressively builds an image in the sub-conscious mind of the ideal partner (s)he will like to have. This virtual image borne in our minds becomes a reality when we meet the person whose attitude, aptitude, altitude and other personal attributes match with our imaginative “ideal”. The journey of a compatible relationship thus begins.
This image of the “ideal person” is influenced by one’s intrinsic desires and exposure to the outside world. This might be a celebrity, a mentor, or simply some imaginative ideal when we set our minds wondering. But do “ideals” really exist? Many people under duress bow for the proxy to their “ideals” to satisfy temporal social pressures. In the long run, incompatibility becomes evident and divorce becomes eminent. For sure very few meet their ideals during their earthly sojourn. But as an African adage goes, in the absence of the crocodile, we can perfectly manage the lizard (reminiscence of my friends from CCAST Bambili..).
“Perfection” and “ideals” are alien to mankind. In real life we do rarely meet our ”Ideals” , we build them. The difficulty which sets in is that of what trade-off one must make to go for a “near ideal”! This is because if one must wait for the “ideal” Mr. Right/Miss Right then one will definitely wait forever,……..for ideals only exist in an Eldorado. EIN 2014-04-17.

“And Miss X is thinking: Maybe I'm just too idealistic, waiting for a knight to come riding up on his white horse, when I'm sitting right next to a perfectly good person, a person I enjoy being with, a person I truly do care about, a person who seems to truly care about me. (Anonymous)”.

Life and Choices

You defeat yourself when you try to control things outside of your direct influence.
Life is a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Quite often, you can control the former not the latter. An early-in-life understanding of this limits your frustration in life. Although your external environment keeps changing, although people around you keep changing, although events around you keep changing, you should always strive to maintain your internal milieu at a relatively steady state. Chaos sets in once control of "self" is lost. Most important, you should always have at the back of your mind that, the person who has the most to do with you is you, not some person(s), not some external forces, not your environment but you and the choices you make. Try as much to be rationale when you make your choices…..because your life is controlled by your choices.