Walking through the urban jungle, listening to the madding crowds, wading through social media and mainstream society alike, one can’t escape the feeling that: the life of an average Zimbabwean is a hurting, conflicted life… some roller-coasting pressure pump that generates enormous amps of unhealthy emotional turbulence; a cauldron of anxiety, hope, fear, anger, despair, envy, guilt, stress, betrayal and painted joy presenting in sundry negative permutations that so often make us an intriguing cocktail of bitter, beaten, sad and imbalanced citizens! Every day, somewhere between ourselves and the institutions that govern our lives, somewhere between our thankless bosses and our wives, somewhere between the fees, exams and bills, Zimbabweans seem to connive to produce a raging minefield of puerile politics, toxic relations, dashed dreams, blown jobs and money potholes, deadlines with dead ends, promises and heartbreaks and mandates never fulfilled! We are an emotional wreck as individuals and as a nation.
By Zifiso Masiye
Our ability to navigate our way around important, strategic decisions that affect ourselves and our future is compromised in the extreme. What is it that kills our genuine joy?
Neither expect nor demand your happiness to come from people or things outside of yourself
A great source of our unhappiness has to do with the common habit of exporting our sources of happiness to other people. Wives and girlfriends routinely invest in an expectation of lifelong happiness that should flow seamlessly from their husbands and boyfriends to them. To a great extent, the reverse is also true.
The parent-child equation of happiness is no different. In my own language, they actually proclaim “ukuzala yikuzimbela”… to beget a child is a wise act of self-preservation — a personal investment for one’s future comfort and happiness! The happiness of parents is faithfully deposited in a sperm bank. The lifelong withdrawal of instalments of parenting dividends is demanded as of a right. When, for whatever reason, the “child bank” we invested our hard-earned cattle in fails to repay corresponding amounts, with interest, of good parental comforts, our whole world crashes and we scream and curse, “ukuzala yikubola amathumbu”, virtually a wasted sperm! Or “umendo awuthunyelwa gundwane” when relentless hours of exhortation and prayer for loyal, resourceful and generous hubbies fail to grant us the anticipated conjugal joys that our marital faith planted on wedding day. Invariably, we seek to squeeze our happiness from exogenous sources, from spouses, from children, from bosses, from governments and from graves and spirits — sources with which we indeed have some moral understanding, but no absolute control over. We seek to derive our happiness from fleeting things and appearances of peace — clothing, money, cars, big houses, degrees, wanton material accumulation. These are all risky sources and fatally flawed guarantors of our sincere happiness. They are the surest way of disenfranchising yourself of your natural right to your own happiness.
Your happiness is in you — Own it
The search for happiness is futile if we have not found ourselves and identified the ultimate foundations of our peace and happiness inside ourselves. We owe ourselves a huge debt of love. We owe ourselves long, deep, tranquil moments in our personal space, in our own peaceful company to enable us, independent of material trappings and people and social barometers of expectations and success, to claim, retain and own our happiness. We are called upon to consciously take away, back into our possession the mandate of our happiness from things and other people and accept full responsibility of doing those, often unnoticed, but deeply fulfilling things and acts that bring pure joy to our own hearts, independent of the world around us. We are challenged to abandon the rat race, but to dig up the authentic abundance and wealth of peace and intrinsic happiness that lives untapped inside of our hearts and not inside of our stuff, nor indeed in the fortunes or transient benevolence of our significant others. This fact is as true for individuals as it is for nations. The sustainable success of Zimbabwe can never be imported from London or Beijing. Our true and only reliable and proud source of national happiness must be dug out from deep within us.
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What you are is not who you are
The second biggest thief of our happiness has to do with the limiting and restrictive ways we define ourselves. We conceive of our circumstances and our life story and present it to ourselves as some non-negotiable fact of destiny that is cast in stone. Yet, besides the small contribution of the genes and our socialisation, we are the primary authors of our own story. Society helps to lock down our limitless potential by confirming the silos we create for ourselves, defining us whimsically as “teacher”, “doctor”, “nothing”, “tout”, “vendor”, “farmer”… name it! The realisation of our happiness is usually compromised by our life stations and the grave, limiting stupidity of our social definitions of who we are. The definitions and titles assigned to us by society and ourselves are the minutest expression of who we can be. You are the only surviving among a billion sperms, and the seamless talents of all those dead siblings of yours are alive in you! Every day we curse and torment and beat ourselves to death with the story we wrote of ourselves as if it were the truth, when in fact it is a very small, subjective perspective of truth.
Disrupt and rewrite your own story
Being the ultimate author of your life story, the whole script is there for you to tear apart, to redefine the setting, to choreograph and to challenge and tell it afresh. What you truly desire to be and the innate potential to become it have little or nothing to do with your teacher’s predictions, your stepmother’s poisonous doubts, nor your current circumstances. It has everything to do with now and how you want to change your world going forward.
And so it is with the nations and indeed Africa. Africans can and must rewrite their story and script and redefine their destiny without the blinding encumbrance of the story of darkness and the brand of failure we have known and been fed and embraced for centuries. To be continued…
l Zii Masiye writes elsewhere on social media as BalancingRocks
