Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashesSnowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
These are a few of my favourite things…
Hello people, anybody missed me? I’ve been up all night and I’m smiling silly because of Styl Plus’ ‘Iya Basira’ and thinking the shadow of my hair in the mirror opposite my bed makes me look like a karashika, plus One Direction’s “18” is such a story – I’m too romantic abeg, so cheesy urgh!!!
Do you feel that you were born grown up sometimes and other times you’re the most childish person alive? Do you sometimes live out the fantasies in your head to the extent that you forget there’s real life here too, or have you ever been force fed with growing that the said individual keeps pushing it down your throat like trying to feed a sick infant (I think they’re Jon Snow – before he got killed – for even attempting), do you feel being an adult is much overrated – inevitable but still overrated – and you’re not ready to let go of that child in your head or get disillusioned by life yet? Then you’re a Peter Pan like me.
I always wanted to grow up. Dad and Mum, bless their well meaning hearts, kind of gave me a hard time, I thought, ‘oh, if only I were independent, oh if I could do this on my own, I can’t wait to have this, I can’t wait to do that’ so much so that I forgot to live out my childhood, like really pay attention to details, now I’m in my twenties and begging time to please slow down or fast forward to when I’m already rich and famous, my middle name should be confused, not Gloria. I think growing up is hard work and some of us are lazy, we’ve got what it takes but we haven’t had an incentive to, so we stay stuck in our daydreams as time just rolls by. There’s a popular excuse for it, you hear people say something like ‘I’m going in whatever direction the wind takes me or I’m taking each day as it comes or I’m moving with the tides’ mostly because it’s easier to do just that than ‘take the world by storm’ you know, so we procrastinate, we leave things to chance and if anything goes wrong we make sure there’s someone other than us ready to take the fall for it. We give well explained excuses as to why we’re where we are, we have so many survival tactics that we forget that we’re accountable first to God then to ourselves for what we do with our time. We live in an alternate universe where we’re something, anything, where we matter but in real life, we’re besides ourselves as to who we are, what we’re supposed to be, where we’re aiming for, so we stay stubbornly stuck in the lie we’ve told ourselves- that we’re ok with just getting by.
There’s a proverb, I don’t know its origin, that you can force a horse to the stream but you can’t force it to drink water (not sure that’s how it goes but you get the general idea), therefore picking at our lackadaisical attitude to life is tantamount to trying to fill a basket with water –an effort in futility – it might even incite obstinacy if it becomes a recurrent thing (you know how the road to hell is paved with all sorts of good intentions).
So how do you make peter pan leave Neverland? Find an incentive strong enough to pull you out, the challenge with this is the fact that you know what you want at the back your mind, but it seems so gargantuan that you prefer to pretend it’s not there, it’s something so big that you fear you’re too small to pull it off, you don’t want the responsibility that comes with that dream, you’re also scared of the ridicule that may come with failure so you prefer to sit and do nothing, but sugar, you’ll never know until you try.
I’ll leave you with one fact that summarizes my rambling; Peter Pan never got to have Mary (I cried when I learnt that it ended that way, I just broke down in tears in my neighbours’ living room, waterworks and I smh), so maybe a little growing up isn’t that bad, it just might be the thing that gets you to where you should be.
