What if Pride Was a Person?
We learn fully from experience than what we can purchase in books. The knowledge we acquire in books has a nonserious tone to it. We tend to read and forget.
But what we have gone through as ordeals we keep to heart and when sharing them, an arbitrary serious tone takes over. We emphasize so much that we usually delude its importance. All too much that I reminisce about my primary teachers saying it has becomes music to the ears.
I am certain that this confessional story would have the impact it deserves if it was orally narrated to being written. So bear with me that this has taken the death of my ego and a toll on my patience. To heaven with patience.
And to get a gist of it I will compare it with the agony of Jesus. We read in the Holy Bible about his beatings and sufferings. But do we get to be infused with the real pain of a crown of thorns? Imagine how one prick of a thorn sends many to tears what about a banquet of thorns not on your hand but on your head?
Ouch! I might have got you. Now let’s journey from the real world you created and jump into the real reality.
In it, you are not as special as you thought. You exist for the sake of existing. Your sole purpose in life is to exist. Every day all what you desire is food and shelter, all the basic needs exhibited by our ancestors.
All that you need for entertainment is firm relationships like living in the bushman era without any civilization or sophisticated diplomatic shambles. Fairtrade, or better barter trade.
Basic living. Not meaning being frugal and minimalistic but a journey through time with our kind of informational exposure from the Internet.
Welcome to the Ubuntu universe!
This is a long time ago when I happened to host a few neighbors for religious and spiritual sharing. I was a small boy by then full of adrenaline pump and the adolescent urge to impress creatures with skirts.
We were done with the sharing and now as in Ubuntu culture, a gathering isn’t complete without a meal. We shared a meal cooked in pot-fried palm oil. I can’t remember the name of the delicacy but something like pilau.
We should agree that the goose cooked itself. Thinking I was all more special than the others, I began my monologue of boring words that seemed funny at the time. The Mr. Superman.
A little backstory is that we had recently relocated to Ubuntu. And in Ubuntu, people lived promising lives. I thought by relocating it would indicate that we could now enjoy the same good privileged life as the folks here. But it was a mind trick to pacify my life spent in close to abject poverty, living the hand-to-mouth race each and every day.
There we two young ladies and I was placed in the middle of them. Each with a plate of pilau in his/her hand. No music was playing as was our custom.
The stories were mostly about our lives in high school and I ended up turning it to how I was the most privileged. It was a margin call close to revealing the magic card of having performed extremely well in the final exams but I refrained.
Then came the part where you test other people’s egos and subject them to the mental torture of how I got the latest machine. Ehe! The highly specified smartphone. I could swing the borrowed Galaxy Samsung (from a relative) in here. This action has to be meticulously done to ensure that the level is seen and most importantly where the fingerprint sensor is, “on the screen”. Is this small people’s mindset? I could support yes. But wake up and realize it’s my ordeal I am narrating.
Another backstory is that the neighbors were from different estates each with its different architecture and culture. And so one of the ladies came from an estate where the rooms were congested and squeezed although they claimed to be 4 bedroom units, the pathways were not entirely dedicated to the passage of vehicles but mostly potholes of water used to wash clothes. The balconies were merely an average person’s width, more like an extended window to peep at your immediate neighbor. The cables were disassembled meaning that a slight error while driving a low chassis vehicle and you could get stuck trying to wrestle with a cabro-induced catastrophe. The security detail seemed malnourished and impoverished. I can say that it didn’t fit the ideology and the architecture within that of a mammothic house-building art. The surroundings were built for those who had money to spend in mind.
I critiqued here for all of this that I saw was better on my side. The other lady seemed to have escaped the wrath of man. She had enticed me with her looks and so I was to build a name for myself. I was to play on safe balances.
And when I thought that it was enough I continued to bully her on her choice of shoes. I compared them to the basic shoes in the vicinity. I didn’t spare any word change I got but massacred the little confidence she heard in herself. I made her think she was at the bottom of the food chain only to eat breadcrumbs and leftovers.
THE END.
The meeting was over and now I had to deal with the guilt. In Ubuntu, we dare not question the social rank of another for we all rise to grace and fall to grass anytime. As a bushman with basic needs, all that I sought in comparison was pure vanity.
And now the question what if pride was a person? Could it be me?
