a meaningful life
CHILDREN
Whoever told you that the world's best gifts are a distraction, is probably "working you".
Mon.Feb.19.2024 - Ubochi Nkwo
What shall it profit a man, to gain the whole world and loose his soul.
The above is a Biblical concept that seems to talk about heaven. I however would like to take the earthly perspective on it today.
Yesterday, a friend of mine suggested that since I already have 3 children, I should take a break and focus on my life. What life? Any man who tells you that their lack of success is attributable to quantity or age of children, is an errand boy to life. Even if I were a mere Mason, children would not be a deterrent to work, nor would life make any sense without them.
The concept of women waiting to have children, in order to build careers and men waiting to marry in order to "stabilize' is a nonsensical theory of life that is easily disproven by the life's story of every generation of Africans before colonization. My father's father had 26 children and Wealth did not evade him. My mother's father had 22 children and could not have been said to be poor. At least 6 of my Uncles have children who number more than 6 and none of them is suffering for food or a shop to store their wares.
Many however, who have refused to marry and roamed the streets painting the town red are now aged and birthing "babies" and not even the economic gains imagined, exist to compensate the stupidity of having a 1st child at 50 barring any Unforeseen misadventures or natural limitations.
To choose to not father Sons and mother Daughters is the most stupendous and imaginary contribution to a life of achievement. And it can never lead to A Meaningful Life.
OFFSPRING
Zoe Kravitz and her mother Lisa Bonet looking like high resolution photocopies
The English man calls children offspring. My people have a better word "Wa" in my Nkanu dialect or "Nwa" in general Igbo parlance. It means "a cut of". This is the true everlasting life. The ability of a tree to bear fruit and replicate itself, such that if it is ever cut down, it isn't a real loss, since the story continues.
Somehow they have convinced you that it is good to have friends and make time for them, girlfriends and make time for them, work and make time for it, but it is somehow an unusual use of time to "play with yourself".
A Son or Daughter, remnants of you make a better replacement for all the things we tend to value most in life and it is a shame that most people miss this reality until it hits them by accident or at old age. If accident, the miracle isn't always well appreciated, if old age, the miracle can't be perfectly curated.
Worse still is that many marry or friend and consciously have children that are to be delegated to house helps, grand parents, day cares and boarding schools, maintained as a statutory appurtuence of wealth, Status or age without the essential investments of time and tender loving care that makes the little "flowers", gardens and not bush.
FRIEND
Zoe Kravitz and her mother Lisa Bonet looking like high resolution photocopies
What better friend can you have, than a 3 year old boy who stares at you, dependably and says in a loving tone, "Daaddiy, I waaannttt teaeee".
However, the value of this friendship is highly dependent on understanding. If your response to the boy is "getaway from here, idiot, can't you see that am on the phone?" , eventually he will prefer to not ask than to become an idiot for asking. 20 years down the line and after graduating from Harvard, you invite him to come home and work for his father's company, to which he responds in his mind "which father?" and to you, "Daddy don't worry, I have other interests, I don't want to come to Nigeria (Nicaragua, California), I want to find my self here".
No friend will ever tolerate the treatment many people dish out to their children and yet with each new generation, we are getting worse at caring, forgetting that no friend will ever be better, than a Son you grew in love and a Daughter who sees her Father/Mother as her best friend.
LOYALTY
At the heart of most divorce is infidelity or some sort of actual or observed failure of loyalty. It is also at the center of dissolution of most friendships and enterprise partnerships.
Men and Women, even in the midst of the most hardy and hearty experiences of social commitment, risk it all for conducts unbecoming, with less worthy partners.
In children, you can find the most loyal partners, friends and non-sexual lovers. A commitment that is easily sustained by the fact that you are the only possible version of father or mother and the fact is clear, without need for testing, that you are the only such option in life, less any real and terribly pronounced deficiencies you may have, that warrants shifting loyalty or poor training, both of which are responsibilities all your own.
MANPOWER
There is no better work force than offspring.
Beyond nepotism for the sake of corruption, I will never argue against a Political Office Holder who employs a qualified offspring in Sensitive positions. This is because if he is good, his seeds have a 90% chance at being good and if good, they will have greater commitment to the work and his legacy than any others.
Yes, of course, if he is bad, his seeds have an equal shot at evil and a multiple of his vices and rape of the common wealth.
There is a constant saying in Africa "Na me own the work?". Essential meaning, that there is no need to kill oneself (over work), over another man's wealth opportunity.
Children will kill themselves and fight with every bit of commitment to survive the enterprise, precisely because in the end, it is theirs. This is at the heart of the greatest enterprise or territorial expansions including modern giants like Samsung of Korea, the British Royal Family and Koch Industries in the U.S.A.
Unfortunately, modern Africans have not benefited from this, since we raise our children in foreign capitals and with the distance we often create before their travels via Delegation to caregivers and rude, slave like command of their existence, they often return aliens who feel no bond to the family, worthy of sacrificing life and dreams.
if they did, Ekenedilichukwu Motors would have been larger than Airpeace, the Mai Deribe's Kings across Africa and the line of Deinde Fernandez controlling the underworld of Africa as lords of confraternity or diplomacy.
The fight children give, towards the sustainence and expansion of an empire is incredible, precisely because it is personal. Children fight both because you are at present theirs to defend and equally with pure confidence that the yield will eventually fall on them as a more abundant inheritance.
Confused, many people tell their children that they do not deserve any of the things "they" have built.
I am personally confused as to who you are now building for, if your children are not the chief?
PRIDE
At all times when you go to friends of means, they find a way to talk about their kids.
Men of reasonable means, whose kids are not grade A fools, boast more of them, even when they make C rate achievements, than of cars and stocks.
Why most your case be different?
Children represent a most meaningful contribution to a life worth living and represent an incredible asset to boast of and upon which to take pride in the meaningful nature of creation. And you deny yourself of it, to achieve a warehouse full of products, choice academic credentials, movie credits and awards.
Sounds reasonable, only if, you are not reasoning.
How can you live without life. You stock dogs and parrots, visit zoos, preserve forests, save oceans, fight for soil and somehow skip the need for the very seeds that make the fights and preservations a gift and not merely work.
LIFE
Children breathe life into existence and are the most sustaining energy that you can surround yourself with. Many suicide attempts have been stopped by the thought of children and the many who commit suicide because they cannot feed their children are the most perfect combination or Idiosyncratic stupidity and a worthy loss of life.
Children set a schedule and rhythm to life and bring life into any environment in which they are born. They force a reorientation of priorities for any reasonable human being and encourage economic stability and general sensibility to the nuances of a cultured life, including conscious of the impact and impressions of actions, speech and lifestyle.
Smokers, learn to hold their urges, drinkers curtail volume, womanizers suspend crass volumes, preachers moderate over zealousness and those who are truly committed to an excellent world, find the perfect modulators that balance their craft and afford it perfect meaning and referenced reflection.
Children are life, life living right next to you, born of you, growing, blooming and giving every action a more perfected meaning. Is that not a component of A Meaningful Life?
COMPANION
As you move through life you will find that it is a most lonely experience. Sometimes in a crowd, you will still feel the emptiness of being alone because the people around you are minding their own lives. Children are better than wives and husbands at minding "your" business.
As an extention of you, they feel your every action as a grace or disgrace and act to preserve the you that is in them and the them, that you are.
In this tussle is the reason why most parents feel distance from their children because they fail to give what they wish to recieve. They wish that their children make them proud and fail to recognize the need to also be a thing of pride for their children. They wish for their children to move with grace but show now grace in their actions towards them.
They wish that their children serve them but have not rendered such service as a sample towards their children, for better ease of emulation. They want respect from the very things they talk to and treat like "animals".
You can't give what you don't have and as such most children raised with disdain will disdain and those whom you accompany through life will return to you the perfect companions.
Left with no secondary alternatives as parents and aided by the exclusivity of your examples, well raised children will serve, align, respect, grace, appoint and above all accompany you through the greatest joys and the deepest depressions, committed with a binding bond that even spouses cannot offer, precisely because they are blood.
Oddly enough, men have a greater advantage in this bond, as the natural dominating contributors of heredity, however our lifestlyes and sheer wickedness in denying children access to our own endless companionships makes it appear as if children prefer their mothers. That example should also explain to you, the foundation of every bad remittance you have observed between children and their parents, which you may choose to use as an example to procrastinate reaching for these gifts of God.
Wake up, a man at 20-25 should be putting down roots, a woman at 16-22 should be off the market. This is nature, codified in the primacy of our natural sexual urges and organ maturity. It, like all other things of nature, is "nothing new under the sun" and has no consideration for your confused mantras of "living your best life" and "Finding yourself".
Those who wake up early, find a life filled with the stories of their companions and if they end out well, aging in health, they find themselves "loved" Grand and Great Grand parents, a joy that oils life and springs forth more constant celebration that the pumps at an oil well.
If I am to live and die and have no friends ever, give me wives and children, enough to make a mansion small and I would have no need for the neighbours.
You club and travel and work and friend because the vacuums you have left need filling, Vacuums you can fill with pride and joy, if you can be selfish enough to look at your own interests and stop being fooled by posters and books, written by people who are "f**king to seed" but tell you to "spill gifts" along the highway of life, in order to "make it".
Make it to where?, with whom? For what?
How is sure companionship, gifted to lovely things at their young, (points of greatest vulnerability) who gladly gift you with their companionship at your old age (points of greatest vulnerability), a bad place to be, or a worse thing to do, than moving through life drinking with fair whether friends, all to end up raising children in your old age who never get the best of you and are a deep chore your aching bones can barely handle, delegated to servants and growing as far from you as possible, in a house where the walls hear each other, to end in "a run away" as soon as college calls and a repeat of your error in their own lives.
These types will come to your burial but not sit by your bedside at exit, and they are the ones you use as your example of why it is not worth it to start having children, now.
Good to know.
Do you not know that a calculator will never produce the same result on plus as in minus?
Add children to your life, if you want A Meaningful Life. Don't and have all the fun, and build all the wealth and awards, either way, life will go on. But what will be the meaning of that?
SUMMARY
Corporate agendas, Social orders and Political interests have exploited human selfishness to convince people of the need to procrastinate child birth and when born to Delegate their Tutelage. Whatever you have heard, discard it and listen carefully. If they have told you that children will impact your career, they are right, but what exactly is a career worth, in the absence of "welcome home Mommy", at the end of the days chores?
The modern design of work, needs overhauling but before then, overhaul your own life, because what you are postponing is not children but life itself. To shift children for work is to work for no reason for a while before acquiring a reason to work. It seems upside down mad and a poor conclusion for all the academic laurels you dangle and frame.
A Meaningful Life, is a life in which things are done for a reason and the reasons add meaning to your journey. such that at the end you can classify the excercise as a worthy sporting adventure and not mere suffering under the harsh sun of modern reality.
How much stock can replace the smile of a child, gentle yearnings for your tender loving care, the joy of fulfilling their wishes and watching their cheers and excitment at the mere sight of basic things that you take for granted. Yes, it is work and it takes resources but A Meaningful Life is not an absense of cost, or work, rather it is the simple mathematics, that when added together, your life makes sense. What more sense can be sensible that "Wa" , a cut of you to ride in the G-Wagon, enjoy the Air conditioning, Boast of its mother's degrees and live right next to you as a worthy testament that all your work was not presently a waste and in the future, has offspring to make your work timeless and everlasting.
By the way, if you choose to have them, don't let television raise them, keep the househelps limited to helping the house, otherwise you might as well focus on stocking the warehouse because while children are key to A Meaningful Life, if you raise them wrong, your life's work, may be sold at a discount, for a few nights in a night club.
If you decide not to have them and stock your warehouses, they may not get to sell it for a few nights in a night club and they won't need to because others will do a much more efficient job of squandering your life's work, whether in the guise of charity or enterprise... Waste all the same.
Oh, and it would be your fault in either case.
Birth em, groom em, love em and everyother thing you do will make sense, in the context of the everlasting life that they provide. Meaning today, for every bit of sweat you may be enduring and there is no justification for not starting now, children do not limit careers or academic achievements and if they did, better that than to be stuipd enough to allow careers and academic achievements to limit children.
What would be the meaning of that?
AML - SERIES PROFILE
A MEANINGFUL LIFE
the "A MEANINGFUL LIFE" series is a non Religious, Non Enterprise look at life and meaning, written with the hope of getting you to a life of pure Joy, real Happiness and Satisfaction with your own life, regardless of your faith and economic profile.
It does not intend to preach, but where necessary it will. At the end, the desired result is that from this series you will pick up the tools to give your life greater meaning, and live a more satisfying existence.
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