Growing up in a familial compound meant being related to every other resident in some way. A few houses down the road were cousins and extended family going back multiple generations, so that the actual basis of these relationships became elusive over time. If, perhaps, we attached strings to the structures to indicate how each house on the street was related to one another, there would be no space for the trees to grow – like the pear tree situated in the arbitrarily defined center of the community, planted over the tombstone of someone unknown, at least to people my age. Together, the tombstone and the pear tree, which I do not recall ever seeing produce any actual fruits, provided sanctuary for the older youths; they would sit out there in the evenings and talk about whatever people that age talked about; and on more humid afternoons, it provided warmth.

In his novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino described the fictional city of Ersilia, where the residents use strings to signify the relationships that sustain the city’s life. Its inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of their homes to indicate the relationships; string colours – black, white, gray, or mixed – indicating whether the connections are familial, economic, or political. When the city eventually gets overrun by the strings so that its inhabitants can no longer pass between them, they abandon the city and rebuild Ersilia elsewhere.

Every society is formed by the common bonds that connect its inhabitants, going back to the early Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who relied on each other and the environment for well-being. As these communities grew and cultures became intertwined, modern society evolved into complex civilisations over time. In biology, the Circle of Life, beyond the conventional journey through birth, growth, death, and then rebirth (or the continuation of life through an offspring), the circle is nourished by food webs and nutrient cycles, where the decomposition or death of one organism provides resources for the continual development of another. In some species, the parent dies to reproduce the offspring. The mother octopus stops eating and wastes away shortly after laying eggs and dies before the eggs hatch; sometimes they kill and eat their males for sustenance.

In 2015, scientists released an updated Tree of Life showing how over 2.3 million species of organisms are related (photo below). Not only are the connections living things have with one another and their environment necessary for survival of the ecosystem, these connections are complicated and significantly interconnected so that the removal of one could lead to instability and eventual collapse. Animals migrate from one habitat to another to sustain their survival; and sometimes when plants are removed from their natural habitat, they die because the resources in their new habitats are either insufficient or in excess.

Over time, we create new relationships as our needs evolve, and these relationships become increasingly more complicated as we journey through life. As in Ersilia, relationships sometimes become too complex – too tangled – that we need to take a step back and rebuild. When the people of Ersilia move from their overrun city, they demolish the houses, leaving behind only the strings and the structures that support them in place. This labyrinth of strings and poles that remain signifies the relationships and connections that live on even as everything else crumbles into dust.

Ersilia’s people never find resolution, only compromise – a cycle of abandonment and repetition; but one could argue that the emigration from Ersilia was more out of necessity than of self-serving desires; the desperate longing for their community to continue as is. Because, isn’t life really all about continuity?! – the mother octopus dies so new octopuses get to live and keep the specie going. Like DNAs, meaning and memory persist and provide a segue for progression. Even when we leave behind some relationships as we move on to create new ones in new places, those relationships still live in the strings that tether us to past communities, real or imagined.

The relationships that we build – or abandon – along the way, are equally vital for our survival. Every interaction and every relationship, good or bad, adds a layer to your personality; sometimes it's a new taste in music, and other times, it’s a free lesson on human behaviour. Within the labyrinth of our pasts lies evidence of growth, each knot and twist representing a lesson learned, a relationship nurtured or relinquished. It is in the act of detangling and restringing that we find resilience. As in nature’s endless circle of death nourishing life and collapse enabling renewal, our own journeys are marked by beginnings and endings, sorrow and hope.

Perhaps the answer is not in finding lasting resolution, but rather in the willingness to adapt, settling for alignment rather than endlessly pursuing balance; honouring what was while making space for what might be. The city of strings may fall into ruin, but the bonds and legacy of shared stories and mutual influence remain suspended in the air ready to anchor whatever comes next.

I think of myself as a product of all the people I have met and all the experiences I have had. On some of my darkest days, I think about where I grew up, I imagine the little structures – trees, stalls, electric poles, abandoned constructions, and that godawful grave stone where budding relationships were fostered and friendships were strengthened. These memories serve as a scaffolding on which every new experience, and every new relationship, is strung.

The rest of Calvino’s paragraph reads:

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

Here’s my favourite song this week:

and here’s what I’m currently reading:

A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - a fictional novel set in contemporary Kenya in the events leading up to the country’s independence. The novel explores key themes of colonialism, identity, and community.

Apple in China by Patrick McGee - An account of how Apple, the company, came to establish its supply chain in Asia. The author explores how the company has come to be almost entirely dependent on China for its production, and the (geo)political challenges that threaten its continued existence.

I was never really good at “musical chairs.” It might be that I didn’t quite get the logic of deliberately disrupting music, or that I was always too elaborately dressed for parties. I didn’t enjoy watching either.

And speaking of music, here is my favourite French song of the week:

The game of musical chairs, also a metaphor for life’s instability, uncertainty and changeability: an allegory for people’s search for their place in the world, oftentimes, never finding it until the end of their lives. The children’s party game punctuated with laughter and animation, joy and playfulness, can also serve as a reminder that life is, well, not that great.

A friend reminded me in recent conversation that everyone is in a race, and as we sprint heedlessly toward the next goal or the next milestone, we miss the changes that happen to and around us; we pay more attention to the things that are not going well and ignore all the joy and laughter that we experience in our lives à la musical chairs. Between all the chaos and scrambling to find a seat, each contestant has a few minutes where they get to feel pleasure, moving to the rhythm of the music and getting cheered on by the audience – moments of what should be unfettered joy, but rather marked with anxiety and stress.

When the loser is eliminated, one extra chair taken away, a metaphorical symbolism for how [likely] one has to fight for their place in the world. A reminder that joy is [often] fleeting. That the rhythms you dance to might be one of chaos and uncertainty. That it doesn’t matter how well or how badly you dance, how much we pay attention to the rules of the game, how effective you think the strategy of slowly dragging your feet across the dance floor would be when the music stops, you still might be slower than the next person and you could be the one who gets chopped in the next round.

Then the music starts again, and you have to dance, or at least pretend to.

Metaphors like this one are pervasive in everyday language, helping us understand, describe, and make sense of the world around us and our experiences. But how and why are they formed? What are the factors that go into conjuring the perfect metaphor? Are they even necessary to begin with?

In Technosymbiosis, N. Katherine Hayles argues that the metaphors we use to describe the relationship between humans, artificial intelligence, and the environment, determines how [we] relate to the technology. The relationship which would determine not just what we think about, but how we think. For Hayles, the metaphors that we chose to describe the things around us [Artificial Intelligence in this case] shapes our attitude and determines how we interact with [the technology]. Good metaphors encourage participation and open discussions. Bad metaphors engender fear and discourage participation.

Metaphors have evolved from simple rhetoric to tools that give form to an otherwise abstract concept; illuminating where dark, sharpening where blur, as in the subtleties of emotions. Some metaphors help us make sense of concepts that we don’t necessarily agree with, or like. In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontang writes:

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

But, metaphors can be as limiting as they can be empowering. Take science metaphors for instance, which, employed largely to communicate scientific findings and observations, can also have sociopolitical implications, reinforcing and propagating harmful and outdated stereotypes. For example, medical advancements in the management of AIDS only happened after the name changed from GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). When it came to fore that the disease did not only affect gay men, public attitudes shifted the narrative from discrimination and stigmatization, forcing critical intervention and research funding, and the discovery that the causative virus could be transmitted through mediums other than sexual intercourse. The world has come a long way since AIDS was described as a “plague” carrying connotations of death and destruction, or as “punishment” for immorality and deviance.

Metaphors have also been criticised for oversimplifying complex concepts leading to false conclusions. Sometimes they add new meaning to words, and create a world where none existed before. As Sontag argues in her critique of medical metaphors, the way that illnesses are described can give it a reputation that adds to the suffering of those who have it, for example, the implication of medicine's militarized metaphors for diseases. Take the “War on Cancer” for instance. The metaphor of war indicates that, as with all wars, the enemy must be vanquished at all cost. The implication, especially for early victims of this metaphorical invasion, was that their bodies were turned into a battlefield, the cancer cells as invaders to be destroyed at all cost, and the doctors, soldiers at war.

The implications of this violent rhetoric is that the treatment of cancer itself has historically been warlike – from radical and ultra-radical mastectomies by ruthless surgeons who had no hesitation to cut out as many tissues as they could justify from the bodies of their patients, leaving many injured and permanently disfigured, to pumping patients full of combinations of multiple high-dose toxic chemicals (mustard gas was being especially used in chemical warfare during WWI), which pushed patients almost to the brink of death, sometimes over. Failing to win the battle against cancer, then, indicates weakness and a personal failing on the patient’s part.

But, this is not a case against metaphors, rather one FOR choosing them more carefully. Beyond helping us make meaning of our lives and our experiences, metaphors also shape perceptions and influence our feelings and actions. Neuroscientists suggest that metaphors are not merely rhetorical seductions, but they have the ability to alter the brain’s cognitive functions and thought processes. I guess, if you think about life as a battlefield, every setback, every confrontation, and every diversion from the norm would feel like a threat to be met with likely unnecessary force.

Yet, as in life, metaphors are not static, they evolve and adapt to context, accounting for all the aspects of our lives, even those buried underneath rubbles of nuance and uncertainty. If illness is a battle, how do we decide when to surrender? When to comfort and when to inspire hope? When life is no longer a battle but a journey, a storm to weather, when do we constrain? When do we impose expectations that may or may not be impossible to meet? If metaphors influence our lives and our relationship with the world around us, how do the metaphors we choose account for all the aspects of our lives — new love, broken relationships, big unexpected changes, the community that falls along the way and the ones built along the journey? How do our metaphors account for the world that is yet to come? Do we bury our dead metaphors because that is the only way to truly be?

Do we ever truly escape the limits of language, or, as in musical chairs, we dance around them, forcing meaning into context and forever dancing around metaphors, trying to make them mean more than they can?

Perhaps the key lies in choosing metaphors that evolve with us and account for all of the complexities of our lives. For me, life is seasonal. Just as the earth moves through different seasons — Winter for stillness and rest, albeit gloomy and lifeless; Spring for new beginnings, growth and rebirth, albeit wet and pollen-filled; Summer, hot and uncomfortable on somedays, but a season of sunshine, flourishing, and joy; and Autumn, a time for release, harvesting, transitioning, and letting go — natural and dynamic.

Choosing your own metaphors can be an act of empowered meaning-making; reinterpreting your experiences, redefining and realigning with your values, rebuilding approaching time and seasons with flexibility and resilience; dancing when the music starts, and stopping when the beat drops out.

Related essays:

I have become a tad obsessed with season changes. I find them romantic. I like the onset of spring when the cherry trees start to blossom, and the skies become bluer. I like when summer slowly changes into autumn and the leaves once again come apart from the trees, a dissociation both colourful and melancholic…

…one end from one beginning, old from new, hot from cold — the lines between becoming clearer.

Life is full of these sorts of dichotomies. Love and hate, life and death, peace and unrest, friends and enemies. A child born somewhere at the moment an old woman draws her last breath. A marriage made consummate against the mise-en-scène of Niagara falls while another couple signs their divorce papers and go away to grieve the end of something they once cherished. Yin and yang, light and dark, loss and gain.

Leaving and returning – neither can exist without the other.

I have left home only a few times in my life, every time the distance is farther than before, but never permanent. I like to leave because I like to return. Home is where you leave to return.

“Home is not a place” permeates art and lore. At various points in my life I have repeated this lore, even dared to believe it.

“Home is a feeling”

“Home is a state of being.”

“Home is where you feel safe.”

“Home is a sense of belonging.”

In an article by the Atlantic, home is put forward as a form of identity. Oftentimes when you meet a stranger, one of the first things they ask is “where are you from?” The reason, in spite of how much a person moves around or where they find themselves in the world, is that it tells something about them. I like to think of myself as a product of all the places where I am from, a stem of sorts, from where all my parts emerge – I can leave in autumn, and return in spring.

Home signifies permanence. It exists in the people we have come to know, or hope to meet in future. It exists in routines we have built and routes we have come to be familiar with over time. It exists in the memories we have collected throughout the course of our lives. It exists in both comfort and the discomfort we seek to escape from. It exists in the things we had, the things we have, and the things we want.

Home is abiding. It is the place you return to, even when the bricks that make up it’s foundation waste away and everything lays in ruin. It is the place where, in the words of Robert Frost, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Frost’s narrative poem The Death of a Hired Man follows a conversation between a couple, Mary and Warren, about Silas, an old unreliable farmhand who has returned to their home to seek shelter after years of being away and neglecting his responsibilities. The poem explores themes like compassion vs practicality, home and belonging — things that are because of the other.

Silas has returned to the couple’s farm in poor health — it’s the only home he knows. When he walked out on the couple during the harvest season, he abandoned his obligations, leaving them without a farmhand. Contractually, they are not obligated to take him in as he has returned after the harvest season, old and frail and of no real use to the couple.

Warren insists that Silas has been unreliable and undeserving of help. Mary argues that the farm is the closest thing that Silas has to a home, and asks her husband to be compassionate — He has come home to die, she says.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they HAVE to take you in.” Warren said, emphasising that acceptance and belonging is an obligation only formed through blood ties. To which Mary retorts:

“I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Warren’s definition implies that “home” is where forgiveness and amoral obligations reside — where, no matter how badly you have treated the people there, you can still always expect to be accepted back, arguing that Silas ought to go to his brother. Mary insists that they are obligated to accept Silas anyway, blood relation or not. Warren’s definition is cynical, Mary’s is a bit romantic, but both of them are right of course. Ultimately, Mary is able to convince Warren to at least go see Silas where he laid, but when he returns, he informs her Silas has passed away. Home, the place where you go to die.

The idea of home as place appeals to me because I know that I can always return, whether it is to my parents’ house in Nigeria (home: the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household) or to my apartment in England (home: a place of residence). The being, the safety, the acceptance, and the belonging, they all exist in the abidingness. Because, as sure as all the leaves that fall off in the autumn are going to return in the spring, you can just always return.

I think I like leaving so much because I am obsessed with the returning. One that exists because of the other.

In There’s Always This Year, Hanif Abdulraqib writes:

I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.

On my birthday this year, I went back to Lagos after being away for two years. It was just as I had left it — the stench of the vile mixture of dirt, urine, and sewage boiled by the scorching heat of the sun; the loud sounds of blaring horns, cursing motorists, raging pedestrians, roadside peddlers — all so familiar. Home.

I thought about my first time in the city visiting my sister over the holidays. And then the next time, about 6 years ago when I left home, my parents’ house, to start out on my own. Wide eyed, scared, feeling lost and afraid, I contemplated running back straight into the airplane so the pilot could take me back home. My legs would not move though, so I waited, fixated until my friend spotted me. It was my 25th birthday and in more ways than one, that was a defining moment of my life’s journey. I could either move forward or go back, so I chose to move forward, even though at the time I wasn’t quite sure what that meant or if I was even moving at all.

I think about both visits as returning, both times with different agendas, but a return nonetheless. And everytime I left again, I would have changed. Yet, whenever I have to go there, they HAVE to take me in.

I often think about this passage from Abdulraqib on “the return”:

And so, it was never the leaving. I was born into an obsession with returns. Something or someone leaves you, but you'll get something or someone back. Sometimes it's an even exchange. You kiss a person goodbye when they go away for a few days, and they come back to you the same person they were when they left. Other times, you lose a part of your childhood and something harder grows in its place. But a return is a return.

The old me will always exist in the memories, and so the future me will exist in these moments. I have experienced loss so that I can appreciate gaining. I know sadness so that I can recognise joy on the day it returns. I understand grief and so on the days when it leaves me alone, I know to make the best of it. I know hatred and I know love – the things that are because of the other.

Home, to me, will always be a place. It could be physical, dynamic, tangible or metaphorical, but it is also abiding. Something connects us to them, so that when we leave, we can return, even if it fails to stay the same. It could be a place buried in memories past or a place that exists in a hopeful future. It exists in people, far or near, those we leave behind and those we are yet to meet. It exists in a love that stays forever, in living or in death, a love to which you can just always return, even if you only go there to die.

This piece is lifted directly from my journal. I suppose I have done a fine job polishing it to make it fit for reading, but if I haven’t then I expect you might find it to be a little long-winded. I hope you are all doing well?

It has become routine for me to start counting down to my birthday from May when my best friends turn one year older than me and start to rub it in. May, June, then July. I have a love-hate relationship with routines: I love them because I don’t do well with spontaneity. I hate them because I don’t do well with sudden change. But not this one. This is the only routine I love. 

Also, because it has remained unchanged since 2009.

More recently, I have been attempting to find some rhythm in my life – some of it has come from having some semblance of a routine, albeit never truly. Despite occasionally falling out of balance, the little oscillating patterns have been somewhat steady. For the most part, my days have the exact pace and the same motions.

2009 feels like a lifetime ago, and so much has changed since. I had just started University when I met my best friend. I thought she was cute and funny at first, but when she said “I’m older than you by 19 days” I knew I was never going to let her go. It’s been such a long time since that interaction and I don’t remember most of it.

In recent conversations with friends, time has been a consistently recurring theme. Every day, something changes around us. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” one person asked, barely getting the words out amid a row of laughter.

But time is a gift, however you choose to look at it. Some gifts are good, some gifts you don’t quite fancy, but a gift is a gift. The thing about this gift though, is, it is best shared with an audience. Some people will leave before the end of the show, some people will stay through the dullest, most hard to watch parts of it, and some will stay for the encore.

‘Again!’ 

I love an audience. There is something to having witnesses to the journey of your life. (I perform better when tasks are written down; my notepad serving as my audience and a witness). As time passes and your own memory starts to fail, you can always count on your witness to recount that journey – truthfully or garnished, it hardly matters. No matter how many seasons you live through and now many things change around you, your audience lives to testify, to bear witness.

I never make it through the cold seasons without being incapacitated for at least a day. A combination of antihistamines and whiskey forcing me to stay in bed, drowsy and unable to function. I do believe I had my first drink as an adolescent, I don’t remember when exactly; but I vividly remember my first glass of whiskey as an adult. It was a warm July evening, and there was a boy – there’s always a boy – watching me closely while I try to play it cool, trying to prove that I was tough. I was now grown.

It was not so much about impressing a boy like it was about trying to find some form of validation, to reassure myself  that I could handle anything. I had just moved away from home, for the first time in my life,  and I knew that I needed to become untethered from everything that I knew to become the person I needed to be in order to make it through this new season of my life. Much like the cuttlefish, this was my camouflage, my angle for moving from outsider to insider. I don’t remember how much I drank that day, but I know that in more ways than one, over half a decade ago, that night changed me.

I hate routines because when there is a quick, unplanned change, it’s hard to refocus. However, change in itself is not all bad. With a potential for good and bad, and the ability to move both quickly and slowly, change is how you move from one season of your life to another. Now, I have a love-hate relationship with change. I like it better when it’s slow.

I like a slow burn in every possible context. I myself am a witness. I like to watch the sun rise in the winter, and I like to wait for it to set in the summer. I like to watch a colony of ants transport crumbs. Slowly and steadily. Like a candle whose flame captures your attention and holds it, flickering through the wind, undecided about dying out just yet. I like the kind of change you can live through. The kind of change that happens in small, reasonably paced frequencies, patiently waiting for you to take in all of it.  The kind that allows you to take a moment to rip off multiple pages from your story and re-write or burn them altogether. The kind that gives you time to grow with every choice, every mistake, every tear drop, every loss, every win, every stomach churn and every motion sickness. Where you can raise your head, splash some water on your face and continue your journey. Mistakes are punished, but like a hangover, the punishment is swift yet merciful.

I no longer fear a hangover. The journey between my first sip of whiskey, and my second first sip, and the sip I had today has been incredible. My audience has been pleasant and pleasantly entertained. So, when my friends ask me where I see myself in five years, I never have an answer,  not because I do not occasionally have a day dream wherein I play out my life a few years ahead, but because I know the answer which they seek from me, and I do not have it.

But, the thing that I love the most about slow change is neither its benevolence nor its mercifulness, it's the knowledge that there is no finality. Don’t get me wrong, I hate when time seems to be unending, especially when you are suffering. There is no fun in watching your misery drag out excruciatingly – and I know this because I have woken up from a surgery in the middle of stitching just as the anaesthesia began to wear off. When I opened my eyes the second time after what seemed like an eternity, my boyfriend was seated at the edge of my bed reading a book.

I haven’t spoken to or seen him in a few years. It was an excruciating process which took another eternity,  but I served out my sentence and went through all the stages of grief. I occasionally think about him, but like some distant memory, a dream sometimes. I don’t think that I remember what he looks or sounds like anymore, save for the bare silhouettes of him that form in my head. But, that is the beauty of slow change, you can just always carry on. And time is the wheel that carries you forward.

“The universe is full of magic things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

— Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes.

Ghosts or spirits, signs or patterns, the idea that magic [probably] exists is intriguing.  As a little girl, there were moments where I hoped that someone – perhaps a stout and clumsy old lady with wings and a wand which could turn mice into horses and pumpkins into carriages – would come and save me. Like the time I broke my mother’s expensive china and hoped they would somehow get mended before she got back from her meeting. But, with every time I needed saving that she [the magical fairy] didn’t show up, my belief waned a little bit.

Looking back now, I appreciate just how innocent children are. The bliss that comes from not knowing, not being disappointed… Most adults do not believe in magic, even though scholars have argued that, more than we know, we engage in magical thinking in our day-to-day thoughts and actions. Like deleting images from your phone and believing they are gone forever, or planning an outdoor activity on a certain day because the weather app on your phone says it’s going to be sunny that day, never once stopping to consider the possibility of a rainfall.

Arguments about whether magic is real or plain myth usually play into agnostic logic – the insistence of the presence or absence of a higher power. Other times, it’s just parlour tricks. I can’t say whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, but I sometimes wish that I held onto that juvenile innocence a little longer. The last time I hoped for a miracle was when my mom had just slipped into a coma. 

Miracles, magic, different sides of the same coin. Theistic thinking encourages the belief in miracles, magic, the supernatural, always finding meaning and interpretation to events – signs, they call it. While we sneer at them cynically, and sometimes proclaim “it’s just a coincidence.” And perhaps we are right, but what if they are too? What if magic is a proliferation of several ‘useful’ coincidences?

You pay a compliment to a new colleague and they become one of your best friends.  You spot a boy across a crowded restaurant then run into him again at the most random place and start what would come to be the wildest romance of your life.  You meet a stranger at the salon and get a career breakthrough. You employ the services of a web-designer and one year later you find that your life would be meaningless without them in it. It could all be a coincidence or maybe it’s magic? Sometimes we all need a bit of magic in our lives, we call for it, but only under our breath, afraid to say the words out loud for fear of sounding silly. 

In Magic, Science and Religion, Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argues that magical thinking (and superstitions) help fill the void that is created by anxieties about the unknown and the uncontrollable. He talks about how Melanesian farmers, who, despite carrying out rigorous farming activities guided by extensive knowledge of the soil, seedlings, weather conditions, seasonal changes, pests, and plants, perform a series of magic rites over the gardens. They consider the magical rites as completely indispensable to the welfare of their farms, but what would happen without these magical rites? No one can tell since no native garden has ever been made without its ritual. Malinowski writes:

“We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable and well under control of rational methods and technological processes… The integral cultural function of magic, therefore, consists in the bridging-over of gaps and inadequacies in highly important activities not yet completely mastered by man.”

The void created by the unknown and the uncontrollable, we fill with illusions. Like the belief that everything will work out in the end. The confidence that when we perform an action, the outcome that we expect will come to pass, even though there is no guarantee that a meteor wouldn’t hit the earth before your 11am meeting next Wednesday. What are the odds and who is rolling the dice?

Or, maybe the world really is full of magical things.

The way that the cherry trees blossom to signal the start of a new season, the small colourful birds that sing to remind you that there is so much happening around you, the calmness of the lake that inspires a peace within you, the love that provides a canopy, the friendships that shield you even when you don’t know it, the people who write the music that speaks to your soul, the voices that render said music with such bewildering flair that their voices cuts straight through you and caresses your soul and make you feel – sadness, joy, indifference, feelings… it’s all so spellbinding, so magical.

I really like Nina Simone’s “I put a spell on you.” The way that her voice bellows through the mic, adding life and force to the words “you’re mine”... like  command, a spell. Conjuring up her love while spinning the liquid in her cauldron, calling to him & leaving him no choice but to be hers.

I do hold some superstitious beliefs, like people are destined for each other, whether as friends or as romantic partners, whether they are fated to meet is another question altogether. But I also believe that no two people come in contact with each other by chance, and that a relationship that ends was never destined to survive.  This is my biggest lesson from past relationships and friendships that ended: we all engage in some form of illusion that people will be in our lives forever.

It doesn’t matter whether superstitions hold true or whether magic exists, whether ghosts are real or whether spirits roam the earth, we all live with some form of illusion, believing that that there is something or someone out there who could make our whole lives better, like a new job, a new home, a fresh start, a new lover, a new friend, or a fairy godmother if you’re Cinderella.

Magic could be real or just parlour tricks, and a magician never reveals his secret, so even if we ask, we don’t hold our breaths for an answer; so, we go away trying to predict patterns and read signs, and attempt to find a logical explanation for the questions whose answers are not readily available to us.  But maybe believing is all we have. If there is any possibility that magic exists, would it be such a ridiculous thing to actually believe in it?

I miss the harmattan. There is an awkwardness to the dust that settles back on the furniture just a few short minutes after cleaning, that is comforting. The way the dust rises to fill the streets with every little disturbance. The heat tumbling through the morning fog, piercing the cold to become sunlight. Air blowing hot and cold, creating a balance that, despite the discomfort of constant sneezing and chapped lips, felt safe. Like home.

A humbling lesson from the past week has been that the semblance of stability that comes from having a routine is more or less arbitrary. A minor health issue at the start of the week and some inconvenience from a phone carrier led to every plan I had set for the week completely falling apart, even though I had settled nicely into a routine of oscillating movements within my apartment and around the community.

I would come to spend forty eight hours tweeting about how the ‘technology oligarchy’ has doomed all of humanity and the robots are taking over; but not before I sent  a total of one-hour long voice notes filled with complaints to my friends.

The sixteen months I’ve been away from home has been the same — marked by long hours of complaining to my friends about things they cannot control while they just listen to me, offering assurance or advice, and sometimes, hope. Within this time, I have made new friends, fallen out with old friends, found myself lodged in new romance, and flames that spark quickly but refuse to burn.

One of the best parts of human experience is sharing yourself with other people. It never really matters the capacity in which you do, but there is a satisfaction in walking out from an interaction knowing that a connection has been created, whether it is good like meeting a stranger on your first day in school and forming a lifelong bond of sisterhood, or awkward like being forced into a conversation with an old lady who is uncomfortably racist but also weirdly nice to you because you speak fluent English.

I miss home. Yet when my friends replied back to my overburdening complaints, a text back for every sentence, with proportionate amounts of pity for my health and anger towards the phone carrier; their words coming to wrap around me like a blanket, warming on a cold morning, and comforting, like a warm cup of tea, or a glass of whiskey at the end of a long work day; I am reminded that home is not always just a place.

At the beginning of the year, someone asked me what friendship meant to me. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my response until now: a love that saves. A love that reminds you that you can go through anything because it is there to hold your hands through every crazy moment, no matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable. A love that stays on the other end of the phone for hours unending so you stop being scared and finally fall asleep. A love that endures through the long night and sustains you until the sun rises. A love that anchors you long enough, and when you are ready to fly, adds winds to your sails. A love that heals. A love that offers stability when everything else in your life is falling apart.

I’ve been reading Bell Hooks’ All About Love, and in the first chapter, she talks about love as an act and not just a feeling as we have come to know it; an intentional choice to care for, and “nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual growth.” By adopting Hook’s notion of love, the role that my friends play in my life becomes clearer by the day.

Home is a person, or a group of persons who wake up every day and choose you. Choose to love you. I hope that everyone can look around them and appreciate the love in their lives, whether it's from friends, family, or a romantic partner. Love is not some rare commodity that is only available to a select few.

I have spent most of the past week sharing excerpts from All About Love with my friends, and here are some of my favourites:

The search for love continues, even in the in the face of great odds.

Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.

Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse. It leaves many people wondering why, if it is so easy, they continue to be trapped by feelings of low self-esteem or self-hatred.

To be fully alive is to act….Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power. But as we act, we not only express what is in us and help give shape to the world; we also receive what is outside us, and reshape our inner selves.

And here is my favourite song of the week:

My sister only ever had one rule for New Year’s—don’t start the new year with laundry from the old year. Every year since, for well over a decade, laundry on has been an important component of my New Year’s eve ritual. Like many repeated rituals, this activity became, for me, a routine, something I had done over and over, like a thoroughly rehearsed speech or a dance, paying little attention to it—mindless.

The thing with rehearsed speeches, dances, and most mindless activities is that you never really give much thought to it until you break a sequence, and then, you do. And for the first time in a very long time, I crossed over to a new year with a basket full of dirty laundry.

As I stood out on my balcony, watching the fireworks go off, I remembered telling my best friend just a few hours before, and with utmost certainty, that this year was not going to be any different and that I would spend the evening down in the basement with my laundry. As I watched the sky fill up with colourful sparks of light, I felt warm inside, even though the temperature stood at a bone-chilling 2-degrees. I thought about how the year, 2023, had really played out. Much like the fireworks display—which starts out as a rocket shot into the sky trailed by a line of dust, or is it smoke?! First a crack, then unpredictability, is it going to be a bang or a crackle? Sometimes the fireworks line up in perfect symphony, and other times, it is a cacophony of ear-splitting bangs and cracks, filtering in from several directions creating chaos.

In my last newsletter for 2022, I recounted the ways in which I had failed that year and made a show of predicting how I would fail in the following year. But over and over, I am reminded, as with the events of the last two or three years (depends on how you count), that assumptions can be dispelled. 2023 was a year of uncertainties; even the world’s best analysts and experts were unable to correctly predict the turn of events.

Chaos and unpredictability. To perfectly capture the year, I refer to a quote from French writer and philosopher, Voltaire:

In 2022, I took an indefinite career break. I decided to move away from home and pursue a postgraduate degree. Between being away from most of the people that I loved, being in full time education, unemployed and burning through my savings faster than dried leaves in the harmattan, and uncertain of what I would do when my break was finally over. I had nothing to keep me grounded.

Sailing the Storm marked an important milestone in my life. At the time when everything was falling apart and my health was failing, my closest friends supported  and pushed this crazy idea that I had, even though, deep down, I love to think that a part of them probably knew that I was going to abandon it on the way—because this is what I do, abandon. So, even though it was not a part of my predictions for the year, I put the website offline.

At least one time throughout  the course of our lives, we are forced to make a difficult decision, and a lot of times, the choices that we make are forced towards self-preservation. For me, I abandon. I like to think that being forced to make a difficult decision is akin to being backed into a corner, literally, with no obvious way out except having to fight your way through an obstacle. And no matter how hard you try sometimes, your feet are clamped to the floor, hands tied by magical ropes out of which you can’t wringle, face covered by masks that stop your breathing—just enough to keep us alive but never enough to hold you down in a fight.

Most of the year was marked with moments like this one, where I not only felt out-of-place in the world, but had also completely lost faith in myself and my capabilities. I wrote quite a bit last year, including the article I published for The Republic, but a lot of the other stuff remained in my draft, and the longer they stayed there, the less confident I was to put them out. Thankfully, however, life is unpredictable, so much so that a lot of times, hope springs out from our most dimming moments, like the first crack of dawn piercing through the darkness. My day broke just as the year was winding down.

So, while I am sad that I had to put Sailing the Storm offline, and wish that things could have gone a little differently, I am reminded once again, through faith, hope, and the love that has kept me through the years, that failure is not always the end. Failure could mean going back to the drawing board, re-imagining, re-strategising, and trying again. This is what I am doing. I might attempt this again in the future, but for now, I will only be writing on Substack. All previous posts from the website and early newsletters will be archived here in no time. We can only move forward from hereon.

Just as I’m about to turn the keys and make my way back into my studio, hands frozen stiff, the sounds from the fireworks crescendos. I look down at my phone and it’s one minute till midnight. Then I look up one last time and say out loud, “It’s going to be a good year.”

I’ve always had an awful memory, and so, my recollection of any event is poor unless confronted with very specific details. Something that I hold on to dearly are the memories that I keep in my journals, and when I have exhausted a notebook, I read through them, transcribe the memories that I wish to keep forever into a new one, and then discard the old ones. This is usually more difficult than it sounds because, a lot of times, I am confronted with memories that I do not wish to relive.

I had to do this again recently. This time, I was confronted with the memories of a past relationship. Let’s call the man "M.” One of my best memories of 'M' involved a pack of cigarettes, a desk, my run-down inverter, Peekaboo (my pet) screaming and trying to break through barred windows, and a dad joke that makes me laugh anytime I think of it. ‘M’ might not remember any of it. Like me, he doesn’t remember a lot of things.

But this newsletter is neither about journaling nor about an old relationship.

As much as I hate to be reminded of things and people that I wish to forget, I have come to appreciate the reminders that life is not all bad and that even when people are no longer a part of our lives, they leave a mark. It might not always be the sort of mark that we want; sometimes it might even be a big scar, but it would be naive to think that it is possible to go through life without experiencing any ugliness, even when you think you have done everything right.

The best thing is to make the most of our experiences of the people who take up space in our lives, no matter how short-lived. If you think about it, you'll realise that we are really little constellations of the people we meet and how we experience them. We inadvertently pick up little habits, mannerisms, and even tastes from those we meet. Sometimes those people stay, and your worlds become intertwined so much that you share things without remembering whose thing it was first. Other times they leave and you are left with remnants of what they were to you, even when they themselves fade into oblivion.

I, for instance, think about a person or a memory for every cup of coffee I make. I think about my father and his bad jokes whenever I brew my coffee at home. I think about my friend Sadey and the way she calls me a “sissy” every time I take a swipe at having my coffee black with no sweeteners. When I grab a latte, I think about an ex-colleague, Helen, who could not pronounce “cappuccino” the first time I had her help me pick up a cup. I think about a two-month-long fling whenever I swap out sugar for syrup, because he gave me a large bottle of 1883’s hazelnut-flavoured syrup, and I think about the Lebanese restaurateurs I befriended a few years ago every time I opt for a Turkish coffee on a restaurant’s menu. It goes on and on.

I remind myself to cherish little moments and to hold on to as much joy as I can because life never fails to remind us that everything is fleeting and happiness is ephemeral. It teaches us to grasp any happiness we can find, with the condition that we must let it go when it is no longer ours to keep. Sometimes it's people, other times it's moments, and then moments experienced with people; we remember to capture those moments or journal about them and relish the moment, but ultimately, we allow ourselves to live it once, because perhaps remembering them later might hurt.

I never want to hold on to happiness forever. I just live. I try to not hold onto anger because I never want to miss a moment where I could laugh at the memory of a really bad joke or smile at the thought of a person who once meant so much to me.

Life offers little joy; take out what you can get.