In the last one week, I have been having a lot of thoughts concerning my life and the choices I have made so far, mostly the wrong and negative ones. I engaged in this activity in order to dig up the lessons I must have left unlearnt. These lessons will help guide me more towards the life I desire to live even as I Focus on the future. Please share in my thoughts. May be it will make you realize some things you haven’t realized or it will provoke your own thoughts in some way.
On daily basis we make choices either by our decisions, actions, or inactions, and so it is very important that we consider the pending consequences of our choices in life. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of us start our journey to regrets. We make choices without considering their consequences.
Somehow someway, it is very likely that a lot of us may have messed up at one point in time or the other, but then it becomes very detrimental to not just our future but also to the society when we make ‘messing up’ a way of life through incessant alcoholism, immorality, substance abuse, character flaws, etc. while there are factors which we may point out as being responsible for our ‘messing up’ and as such need help, it is also imperative that we put in effort to live right. We’ve got to live our lives and try to live it right. Our family needs us as much as the world needs us to be positive contributors to its existence.
A couple of hours ago, a good friend of mine shared with me in my inbox a disturbing photo which she saw. It was a photo of her Facebook friend who was having sex with a lady. One will wonder why that friend had to upload it to Facebook in the first place. The first thing that came to my mind was what if someone gets to save the photo and in a few years time the children of this sex partners see it? Or do we not know that anybody can save the pictures we upload and use it for any purpose? What kind of training will this two give to their kids when they become parents? Like I said in one of my updates, there is more to training a child than just providing material things.
I know of a man who is just 37 years old and he already has 13 children. I know a lot of you may be quick to ask what is wrong with that or why didn’t he go for family planning? Well, let me inform you that the children are from five different mothers. So what really matters – family planning or sexual discipline? I sense someone saying what if he has the money to take care of them? It will interest you to know that he is poor and cannot even take good care of the four plus his real wife living in the house with him not to talk of the others. You can see that this man is well on his way to a future of regrets because since he is just 37, there are many more women to meet unless he realizes himself and turns a new leaf.
Let’s look at the story of a young woman who is already having regrets. Early December last year, her husband came to me to get my opinion of something bordering his mind. He has 3 kids with his wife and the 3rd suddenly took ill. After several test it was diagnosed that she has sickle cell anemia. The man is AA while the wife is AS and after several test it was proven that the baby wasn’t her husband’s. She had been in an affair with another man who was AS hence the reason for the daughter being SS. After much talk, Husband says he will forgive her, but he cannot take the responsibility of spending money on another man’s child that is even likely to die. She wishes she could turn back the hands of time to correct her mistake, but then the deed has been done. She has come face-to-face with herself in the Mirror of Regret.
There are a lot of people who want to be like Bill Gates and yet they’ve never attempted to read about him to know how he got there. They would rather be sipping Hennessey from morning till night than thinking of solutions and ideas. They would rather be in night clubs than to be in the Computer Lab or in the garage studying micro chips.
Often I hear young people say they want to get married early in order to avoid pre-marital sex/promiscuity or rather they will stop sexual immorality when they get married. This is what I say to them as well as to myself; if we do not train ourselves on sexual discipline while we are unmarried, we will have the problem of adultery to contend with when we eventually get married.
We are in a struggle or as some will say ‘rat race’ for financial (business & career inclusive), social, political, and even spiritual growth and yet we hardly pay attention to our personal growth. Personal growth isn’t merely capacity building as some may presume. Personal growth is simply the personality we are building and at the end of the day our personality is what reflects to the world the kind of life we actually lived and the success we claim to have achieved. If you become a wealthy man without a remarkable personality, the world may try to get what it can from your wallet and it will still spit on your face. I think Tiger Woods will understand this better after the scandal which I consider a mistake, but of course ‘mistake’ is what we all term our misdeeds and mess-ups, isn’t it? Watch your personality on daily basis my dear friends.
It is no longer a new thing that a lot of things in our society now reek of sex. Parties, company advertisements, product marketing, music, dance steps, fashion, and a lot of social activities are all fast becoming sex-branded. Little wonder why there is also a proliferation in the incidences of STD’s, Abortions/D & C’s, Infertility, loss of libido, watery/low sperm count, sexual abuse and even decrease in masculine sexual prowess (what the muti-men often refers to as ‘inability to go more than one round’) with one’s spouse. The danger of the sins of the flesh is that we try to defend it and refuse doing anything about it until the adverse consequences befalls us. God help us.
My purpose of writing all these is not for anybody to act judgmental towards other persons or to point fingers. This is so because if we think deeper on these things, we will all see a reflection of our own deeds at one corner of the Mirror of Regret. My aim is to make us look into the future of what and who we want to become and consequently begin to be more conscious of the choices we make – more care into how we live our lives.
There may be those who will feel less concerned about these things. To them how they live their lives is strictly their own business and nobody should meddle with their activities, but then I have figured that a time comes when these people come face-to-face with themselves in the Mirror of Regret. They may not express such regrets to those around them, but the reflection of themselves in the Mirror still remains there – hidden regrets! It is with such people of which we may have also been once like, that these two statements has served as a frame for the Mirror of Regret – ‘had I known’ and the second which is actually a question ‘how did I get here in the first place?’
Too often we’ve done almost all the things we weren’t suppose to do and yet we’ve left undone the things we are suppose to do and we are so skilled in making up excuses for our excesses.
We want to soar like eagles and yet we are always in the poultry.
As I end this piece, I will be leaving you with an excerpt from a book by Andy Andrews titled The Traveler’s Gift. He wrote thus:
“Those who absorb and apply this wisdom will rise to greatness and inspire others to the same heights. Those who ignore the power of these scrolls might seem to prosper for a time, but do not be deceived. Their lives will be only brief illusions, and when their time is finished, they will be chained to the Mirror of Regret. There, they will spend eternity examining a reflection of the person they could have become”
You carry in you the SEED OF GREATNESS and what you do with it is also a choice which has a consequence either positive or negative. You still have the choice to make the most of the remaining years of your life. Don’t disappoint yourself.
