Age nineteen was the most hectic year of my life. I lost my mother. My brother was diagnosed with a chronic condition. I found a job that ended in less than three months.
At nineteen, I packed my bags against the faith of my brothers and sister, traveled to a new city where I would settle for the next five years, with totally new people I had never known or communicated with ever before in my life.
I had applied for an academic scholarship and lost, and that time when I had packed my bags, it was to start a university degree – I was fighting for my dreams in the most hopeless place.
I recall that noon at my point of departure, people who dearly loved me repeatedly said, “My Child, when you go to University, don’t change.”
I would like to confess “Don’t change” was one of the most terrifying instructions of my life.
It seems impossible to stay the same in a world where everything is changing.
But looking back, I find that people don’t change, they just become clearer versions of what they really are – good or bad.
My tribulations and travels were changes that helped me notice a part of me that never changes.
Sometimes it takes a shift of everything so that you can notice a part of you that never changes. My dreams and aspirations never changed, they only grew.
Discover that Part of you that Never Changes
My greatest realization of life was that I am that part of me that never changes.
Celebrity idols and icons fade out of fashion and even the most influential people pass away.
And, no matter how dear, our parents are not forever.
Even for the land of your birth maybe different from the land of you destiny. Countries are merely boundaries drawn by mankind to dominate a wide world.
Then who am I? I am not the world outside, I am the world trapped in my heart. I am what my dreams and aspirations wish this world could be.
You must focus on what you want to be and patiently work towards it.
I wanted to be everything at the same time and everyone in a single lifetime. Stretching my body to be everywhere and be anyone that people called amazing…
Thank God my body was strong enough to keep itself from tearing asunder. Psychologically I was mutilating myself. And my body kept resisting.
As if sensing the resistance in my body, I wished I could escape and settle in another body. I mean, have you ever wished you were born as someone else?
That’s exactly how I felt. And maybe worse than you – when I realized I couldn’t be anyone else, I literally wished I could die.
Many times I wished I could close my eyes and wake up in another world. A world where everything would be different…
I had a world trapped inside me; my own dreams and passions that noone could easily comfort me out of.
It was right to have those dreams. Perhaps the only wrong thing was to expect they could come true by a mere act of shutting and opening my eyes.
My life started to change the day I realized that to stand up for my dreams is to stand up for myself. To doubt my dreams is to doubt myself.
My dreams are the first inventions my mind ever learned to make. They say a lot more about me than anyone can ever claim to know.
Our dreams are whisperings from our identity.
It’s What You say About Yourself
If born into a family of doctors, the easiest thing to believe is you must be a doctor too.
Just as worse is to believe you cannot succeed at anything else except being a doctor, just because no one else succeeded in any other area in your family.
And the most common way to waste your life is to live believing you were merely born to continue family traditions.
The sad thing with following family traditions is that it takes faith, not only in your parents’ strengths, but in their weaknesses as well…
It requires deceiving yourself into believing their weaknesses are your weaknesses too, or that you might fail trying to be anything else except what they were.
The weaknesses of our fathers and mothers can be easily taken for our weaknesses too.
Yet when the children of Israel failed to enter Canaan, God solved the problem by waiting for a new generation to be born. It was the second generation that entered the land of promise.
That shows we are all born into a world of failure, not to continue the tradition of failure but to continue the journey of success.
What you are born into does not matter, what really matters is where you are going.
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA
What the weaknesses of your forefathers may seem to say about you doesn’t matter much, what really matters is what you say about yourself.
Your background will say a lot about you. Your level of education will suggest volumes about your future too. But what will really matter is what you say about yourself!
To desire, dream or drive our lives in the direction of big things is always determined by the identity we have embraced for ourselves.
To embrace great things you have to identify yourself as worthy of great things!
Every day, deep in the heart of hearts, everyone is telling a story about themselves.
Every day, life comes in full, but we receive it in small or large measures depending on what we tell ourselves that we deserve.
You have to give yourself permission to achieve great things. Learn to identify yourself as worthy of the best of life!
Take Off the Uniform!
I once met a certain lady who was returning from church in her uniform.
However, fire was blazing through her eyes and hot pepper was on her tongue – I mean she was in a bad mood and kept cussing on top of her voice.
“You are lucky you found me still in church uniform…” she barked, her sentences interrupted with heavy panting and strenuous attempts to swallow some saliva, then she continued,
“Don’t think I respected you! I only respect this church uniform that I’m wearing! Otherwise, I could have already smashed that needle-pointed long nose off your face!!!”
On and on she wrangled all the dirt and vulgarity enough to make you realize it was only her uniform that made her a saint.
Inside, she was still a raw villain in critical need of redemption.
They said God is not through with His people yet, for some that maybe true – but for this one I sincerely prayed God would get started.
Uniforms don’t make us, they just cover us up from revealing who we truly are.
Uniformity is a mirage of peace, it is a volcano that is only calm at the top yet turbulently ablaze deep towards the heart of the earth.
I remember my years in preliminary school. Unlike at college where you dressed your own way, in our preliminary school, everybody wore uniforms.
And everything was done uniformly.
We were sent to the restrooms in uniform queues, knocked off for home at the same time, and if you finished your exam earlier you couldn’t leave till time was up or everyone was done.
With those uniforms in preliminary school, we were taught to follow uniformity at the expense of our uniqueness.
We were taught more to be more like everyone else and less of our own selves.
I mean – the uniform made it so easy to believe you were like everyone else.
But though we did the same things, we were not the same people.
The uniforms in primary school were for our identification but they were not our identities.
The human mind is ever seeking to view the world in the simplest of terms. It does that is by labeling people according to their races (some are blacks and some are whites – when in fact blacks are chocolates and whites are shades of pink).
Or we were labeled into tribes: the Shona, English, the French etc. (When all these are just different sets of sounds coming out of different mouths to describe the same world.)
Sometimes we are defined according to the academic certificates that we hold. (As if God has granted any piece of paper power to decide human destinies).
You will even be labeled according to the land upon which you were born. As though your umbilical cord still sticks you to that ground such that you can’t move away.
But at the end of it all, we all begin from the testicles of a man and exit this world through one door called death.
In essence, we are more than the labels people give us; they are not meant to describe identity but just to simplify a complex world.
Social class is for identification, but it is not your identity.
Race, Tribe and backgrounds are for identification, but they are not your identity.
Identification is what people say you are; identity is who you tell yourself that you are.
Go and Be Yourself
Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner-voice.
– STEVE JOBS | Founder of Apple Computers
Steve Jobs, the billionaire Founder of Apple, could have died a sorry pauper had he allowed the voice of his background to be a reference for his identity.
Steve Jobs was an adopted child. His new adoptive parents could not afford his University so he was consequently forced to drop out.
Everything in his life was a resounding declaration that he was meant to live and die a loser.
However, Steve chose to believe in the inner whisperings of his heart. He obeyed that inner voice that commanded him that he too, just like everyone else, deserved to live the best of life.
It was what he said about himself that made him the successful billionaire and inventor that he finished his lifetime as.
Go and be yourself. Go and let your attitudes and actions shout louder than your circumstances and background.
Begin to make billionaire strides so perfectly that they will begin to call you one when you are still on your way.
Think the best for your life and the world you live in; and one day they will call you a genius even when your academic certificate might have denied it.
Whoever God has planted in your heart that you should become, know that no voice or opinion can stop you except the voice and opinion you hold about yourself!
Next Chapter…
