A death occurred in 1980 that affected me for a long time. I was 14, and in Nigeria no one thinks of grief counselors. I was even a child, and the dead man was unrelated to me in any way, but I knew him. He lived in Ibadan but he visited his place of birth regularly. At the time he was probably thinking of coming back home to spend his retirement. I was sweeping the front yard when he passed by that fateful morning. He stopped by Mama Adamu, the Akara seller and they exchanged pleasantries. Their conversation coincided with the time I took a stretch to pack dirt into the trash bin. I saw them from afar and saw him as he walked away. Barely 2 hours later, words filtered out that he has been killed. Killed? How? He was on a morning visit to his daughter at the South end of the town. On getting to his daughter’s house, he asked her for Kolanut. His daughter told him, she would have to ask a neighbor who sells good conserved Kolanuts, the kind whose moisture content is low. While her daughter was on that errand, he decided to quickly pay a friend, who lived nearby, a visit. His friend lived near the sawmill. While passing by, he came close to an Agbégilódò – the timber hauling Bedford of old. The big burly men discharging the timber had no idea anyone was passing. A big cut of timber with a huge circumference fell on the poor old man. They had no idea. They discharged all their timber in quick succession. It was an onlooker who insisted that there was someone under the pile. An argument ensued that almost ended in fisticuffs until the daughter appeared in the horizon bearing Kolanuts. The friend he wanted to visit and the daughter, all out looking for him. The timber team were persuaded to roll the cuts. And there he was! A flat mess that had to be scooped up! The men fled into the bush in horror. Before the end of the day, we children heard the horror story. I was broken. His children gave him a befitting burial, his Christ Apostolic Church sang as if the gates of paradise should open. I sneaked out of the house to attend the funeral. The funeral broke me even further. I thought about his old mother who was even too old to come out often. She was often brought out a few days a week to sun bathe. I was eaten inside.
My child mind questioned a lot of things for months. What if he had stayed a minute longer at her daughter’s. Should he have asked for Kolanut? Why didn’t he wait for her to bring the Kolanut. Again I was a child at the time. By the time I started encountering my own spectacular failures and life changing challenges, I understood the randomness of life and the banality of chance. My little understanding of statistical time series also helped. Like I have written here before now, my experience with infertility baked me. It shaped my understanding of life, explained chance, success, and luck to me. Being a daughter of teachers taught me the privileges given by accident of birth and opportunity. All these lessons made me understand the need for compassion and understanding of human failures, pain and suffering. Yes, the human brain seeks to have control and wants to draw patterns but life is a stochastic process. Choices randomly made, or trivial turns of events can easily put anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time and any other combination thereof.
Sad stories of “àrìnfẹsẹ̀sí” that sealed people’s fate, leading to their deaths abound as much as trivial turn of events and accidental encounters that created breakthroughs for people. Even though we do not think about it much, randomness is fundamental in nature and everywhere around us. The case of the airport bound guy who branched at the collapsed Ikoyi tower was just dumb bad luck. We can analyze what would have been. What if he did not go? What if he was held in traffic just a few minutes longer than usual? What if someone had hit his car, thus delaying him? What if? Life can be unfair at times. As humans, we want to attribute cause and purpose to everything. We sometimes confuse causation with correlation. For example you make money because you do some work. So B happened because you took Action A. However, hard work is not the reason why people are rich. Which means A is not the cause of B. Otherwise, only farmers and masons will be rich. That is why it is sheer folly to look down on those who work hard and are still struggling.
In my experience, be prepared for bad luck as in the case of the example above. If you have cancer, you did not offend God, it is either bad genes, a bad environment, or an unlucky mutation. We live in a world of unguided complexity even though there are laws that seems to set things in order. Faith is to help you cope with adversity, it cannot shield you from it. Our brand of religion is a robber of faith. If you subscribe to it, you will feel anguish and great sense of abandonment when affliction hits. You will be bewildered thinking God has inflicted cruel punishment upon you and life will lose meaning and purpose. On the flip side, if you are lucky to be free of affliction and you find early success in life, you will have to work extra hard to tame your arrogance because of diminished capacity for compassion and human suffering.
Before this gets too long, my view, having had my share of failures and suffering is, life is precarious. Be humble, have compassion, do your best possible to advance humanity, have faith and let the universe do its thing.
