MY LADY

I am not sure you’ve met Martha, but Martha is it! Beauty unparalleled, I thought I was doing ok till she came along (I found out I wasn’t!). It was like the sun shone like gold through the trees, how else can I describe such beauty? Ecstatic unbridled magnificent angelic loveliness! When you meet Martha, you become.

I promise not to bore you with the details but the first “date” (I can’t really call it that) was a candle light dinner at a friend’s place, destiny had it that we were on the same table but it was sheer dexterity that made me broach her (trust me). Later she told me that she would have sat there all evening without saying a word had I not taken the lead! I thank God that I did and History has shown the wisdom of those actions.

Martha is no failure, no, not at anything. She is the kind of a lady that would take shit and keep taking and yet still believe the best of everyone she met. She gives and gets to give again, if you heard her speak you would think the earth was paradise and we were all angels! My time with her has made a believer of me. Martha wouldn’t celebrate evil, even of her foes. Give her a good news, tell her of something beautiful and true and she would wake the neighbours with joy, for someone so blessed in Life, Martha lacks pride. If you heard a rude word from her, it’s probably you lacked some sense of humour!

She taught me that one of life’s best compensations is that one can never truly help others without helping oneself; that I should be ashamed to die without winning a trophy for humanity. Martha could sleep through a storm; she hardly get’s provoked and you could describe her mind as “beautiful”. Peradventure I am reading your mind right, she’s got lovely sisters too!

At our first “date”, I told myself that she must be the proud type, you can’t look that beautiful without it getting to your brains, she proved me wrong. She is the epitome of humility, and she isn’t acting. Like my mum (ha ha), she is not the type to parade herself; life is not Broadway. Her friends say she is not envious, I agree. Is Martha patient? Her patience could be trying at times! The most remarkable thing about Martha is her kindness; she always reminds me that there is no reason for an unkind word.

When folks think of “the lady”, they think of Martha. Though she is an allegory of Love, she is a real person. She lives on the inside of us. She is the person we must become and the person we hope to live with. It was Apostle Paul who said that the best of a blessed man without love is noise, a distraction, unharmonious piece of music (a clanging cymbal)! The best of his feats are ineffective and the best of his sacrifices are unrewarding.

It is a choice we must make every day; the one I do daily, to love God, to love you, to love my Lady and to love myself.
“As for us, we know that we have already passed out of death into Life--because we love our brother men. He who is destitute
of love continues dead.” 1 John 3:14 (WNT)

BUSINESS SERIES 7: WHAT GATES DID THAT YOU HAVEN’T

INTRODUCTION

The marketplace is an interesting arena; few people understand it because few people study it. Folks go there to obtain goods, services, wages and returns on investment but it took certain folks to conceptualize and create the marketplace. The point is that the marketplace is man-made!

Like the “father Christmas” and “Valentine’s day” euphoria that generates billions of dollars in sales volume each year, business men will keep on creating cash yielding concepts  that  can be factored virtually into everything, religion not excluded.

Business to some “practitioners” is all about the bottom line; cash returns, but to some others it is a vocation, any potential and practicing business person if he/she would go far must be able to understand trends. Things don’t just happen, people happen to things and one has to understand why. When next you see a new product on the shelve, look closer and meditate on the concept behind it, the rationale of the developer, the response of the industry and the merit of the venture. You’ll be surprised to learn that you could predict trends from mere observation and deductive reasoning even in industries you know little about. For instance certain stocks on the Nigerian stock market would shoot up for the next two years to an astronomical level e.g. Diamond bank because they have a clean bill of health compared to their contemporaries and Pension funds must be invested! (I happen not to deal in stocks much). And certain pension stocks are much devalued (though the pensioners don’t know yet) because they have been invested on the stock market which is just reviving.

GATES

What did he do?

 In a nutshell Bill Gates unlike most folks was able to understand the nature of the computer industry, to project into its future and to (the hardest part) to convince himself that his idea is the next big thing on the planet.

The problem in Africa is that we lack self-belief; even those that believe in God limit Him to a “spiritual experience”. Folks, everyday, everyday, except you’ve no relationship with God, His seed on the inside of you is crying out for expression in everyday issues but most time you’ve looked at yourself, your surrounding and have despised the seed! The worst lie we tell ourselves is that if it is a good idea someone else should have done it, that someone else is you.

The deceitfulness of riches didn’t hinder Gates (the idea that if you don’t have money you’re probably stupid and vice versa); He practically gave away Microsoft Windows but retained ownership. Study his story, if you don’t have money like Joseph Jacob Isaac give the idea away to one with the means (it would have been lost anyway) and bargain to retain ownership/executor rights.

When people with marvelous ideas and no money complain it is because they are either too selfish or are unable to package themselves for a bargaining process. If you are really blessed, you must have noticed the ability of God to always give you better ideas. So to someone reading this article that idea in your heart probably is the only thing that can bring you before the king, don’t despise it, don’t be too selfish to share it, and don’t be too foolish to lose ownership completely.

Most times what will retain ownership for you is competence; the fact that no one else can be trusted to do it as good as you can. This is why reputation is everything, especially when you are starting out. For Bill Gates, the king was the president of IBM.

When you are passionate but Kobo less remember.

                                                Give thanks for the situation (at least you have something!)

                                                Dig; the resource/information is always around/beneath you

                                                Offer what you’ve got to commoners and then to the king (in that order)

God is faithful; He will not leave anyone without a talent at least. Where is yours?

Redeeming the Arts

Redeeming the arts
“He turns revolt into a style, prolongs
The impulse to a habit of the time.

Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004)”


British poet.
The Sense of Movement, "Elvis Presley”

Man by nature is a fan of the arts (probably because he was made by an artist!), He can sway to the tunes of a melody in an unknown tongue, appreciate a wonderful drama in which no words were spoken, the duo of music and drama is common fabric of every culture.
In the African forest, it was tales by moonlight, the beautiful young daughters of the land swayed like gazelles to the melody of the drum and the flute. Old men and women spun tales that would fire imaginations of the young and bear retelling many years later. Man has for centuries longed for entertainment and has found ways to satisfy that yearning. Central to this universal need is the creative genius in man; this genius is seen in the life of a child with his/her capacity for wonder. Tell a child of Alice in wonderland and you’ve found a friend, let the child grow up a little and Peter Pan would do, with the advance in years comes the need to stretch the limit in order to achieve the same degree of wonder and man has tried over the years to climax a climax, at 11 it would take a “Terminator” to thrill him.
Chinua Achebe stirred our creative genius and we applauded, Wole Soyinka did the same and we all remember him for that and Shakespeare too. A great story it would have been until Hardley Chase showed up to illustrate our darker nature, it didn’t take long for pornography magazines to give the lurid details. Stephen King then dared us to stand the tale of it, Harry Porter asked since we didn’t believe in God we could try the witches!
The effect of the Arts always begins from literature (tales, logic and books) to drama, then the logical progression to kitchen table talk (our experience). 45 years ago, nobody thought we would come this far, when the Blues replaced Afro-American spiritual and country Waltz we believe it told the tale of the heart making way for a billion dollar industry that peddled love. From love, the attention shifted to sex, man needed greater stimuli, we had developed tolerance! Madonna’s “material girl” hit the airwaves, at first it shocked some but we later made her a star.
Drama (movies) had to play catch up and over the years it has provided ample illustration to the strides of music and literature.
In Jackson, we saw the progression from “cool” to “wild” to sheer “Wacko”. It would have been ok if the wacko stopped at the screens but it has entered most bedrooms from the sitting room, man had underestimated the arts. It entered in and abused little boys and girls, signed divorce papers and bolstered gay issues, sold drugs and started shooting guns, now it is delivering home-made bombs!
In Presley, we should have known that it wasn’t real. The modern art as you know is a maze of Mundane unrealities becoming existing realities i.e. if you behold it long enough, in the beginning we created arts now it is creating us. The recent Grammies illustrates this point quite well; man is trying to achieve another climax after attaining psychological dependence. if the divorce stats, depression rates, prescription pill related deaths, boobs and tummy tucks, uncanny affections, HIV rate and the average American star emotional life is not sufficient to alarm us then the thought is alarming!
The classical theatrical make-up now involve Botox needles and scheduled surgery visits, man has aromatized himself to impotency. Teenagers not only throng pharmacies for condoms now but for Viagra too!
A frog would jump out of a pot of hot water, but if you put him in a cold one and bring it to boil gradually you have a Chinese dessert, like John Nash in “a beautiful mind” it is time we realize that “it can’t be real, she never grows old”. There is always enough indices to separate reality from unrealities and one is rationality, our modern art has enough inbuilt contradictions to be explained away but man has refused to hearken, not when he is working on another high.
If drinking sea water is the only option for a man stranded in the middle of the sea, it is still a death sentence. Contemporary man is a thirsty man in on a sea of contemporary art, He has looked around, drunk a mouthful, a bottle-full and has adjusted to the taste.
Jesus on the other hand, knows that sea water would never do and had made a candid plea that still bears repeating when He said, “Are you thirsty? Come”.
You don’t have to drink sea water.


Okwonna Nelson