These are reflections hinged on my personal experiences. As with all experiences, context matters. This post might best be understood in its entirety by religious Ghanaians, and maybe by extension, religious Africans. But even if you do not have or appreciate this context, I think there might still be some relatable content because of our collective human experience. So read on, dear reader.
We all face adversity. It could be stagnation in one’s professional career, issues with love and romantic relationships, health problems, or perhaps an addiction. We are all obstructed by some friction, which from our standpoint, hampers our progress in some aspects of life.
Okay, so what? You ask.
Well, I am a teller of stories. In this post, I would like to tell you a mildly fascinating tale: a familiar one about how adversity can morph into a person for those of us of the religious ilk, especially in Ghana. I would like to cut through this complex issue using two questions. Let’s dive into it.
Picture your adversity. Let me ask you this: how big is your problem? I mean, really. Can you confidently estimate the size of your challenge? This question might strike you as inconsiderate, or perhaps it even borders offensive. Maybe you are even driven to ask why you should care about such a question. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme of things, it is a question worth asking.
If you are still reading then I am pretty confident you are not upset about my questions. That’s awesome!
Now imagine me asking you this question at a point where you are actually going through your problem. At that point, your problem might seem so huge and all encompassing. Unlike most physical things, adversity has a dynamic ‘size’, so to speak. By size, we mean how big one’s perception of a problem is. Depending on your disposition and your readiness to face your adversity on a particular day, its size might be huge and imposing, or minuscule and insignificant. If your problem persists over a period, as most do, you will feel that it is an all consuming fire on some days, and a nice, low-volume background song on others. You may want to pause and ponder on this bit for a while before reading on. Convince yourself that what I am saying has some truth in it.
One can pose another question: what is the cause of your adversity? Who is the cause of your challenges, really? Your first instinct is to blame a family member, or a friend, or maybe a colleague, right?. Maybe, you feel the responsible thing is to blame yourself. Let us prompt a deeper question. Is it even a person that is causing your problems?
These two sets of questions are a way to prompt enquiry into the core of adversity as relevant in our societal context. Let us preface our analysis with this fact: adversity comes whether you will it or not. It is a fixture of our life and existence on earth. It is clear that adversity will almost always enter your life, and run its course. Whether or not you will be there when its course is ran is not the subject of discussion. Adversity has a birth date and a lifetime. What we can do is control the narrative about it. This is important. The narrative of a problem is everything. It informs your view on it and how you react to it.
Now get this: if you don’t preemptively and proactively control your response to adversity, it has a tendency to become your life’s philosophy. You will see adversity wherever you turn, even when there is none. After all, everything is a nail to one who wields a hammer. You start to notice, quite falsely, that most of your adversities are being caused by other people around you. This is the first stage of rot. And when this mindset becomes normalised and your worldview begins to be warped in that way, your adversities now start to become adversaries. This is enforced by what we established earlier about adversity: it has a birth date and a lifetime. What has a birth date and a lifetime? Well, a person does. If care is not taken, you start to feel threatened by anyone who didn’t do anything but disagree with you. People grow apart naturally. But you will not see it that way when it happens. You will see any detachment as a betrayal and a defection to the enemy camp. Anybody who is not for you has to definitely be against you. This is the second stage of rot.
But then, we are confronted with a dichotomy. This dichotomy will lead to a wonderful dissociation which I will proceed to explain. Some will now begin to think that, perhaps their family and friends are not evil. They might have done an evil to me, but maybe they are not inherently evil. They must rather be the marionette of an evil being. Do you you understand where this is going? The Devil has been created. The one who truly embodies all evil. Think about it. This is not a sleek way invented by little me to change your religious views about the Devil. If you really think about it, the Devil is really a way for most people to dissociate from their wrongdoings. It is a convenient way for people to absolve themselves of all blame and not take responsibility.
Alas, this is my point. Our society is riddled with people who refuse to take responsibility for anything. It is filled with leaders who will sit at a table and apportion blame, rather than come out with solutions to pertinent problems. The same socialisation will be fighting you as you read my post. But I would have achieved my aim: I merely wanted you to stop and ponder.
Catch my next iteration of this reflection soon!