Push On!

Our crime was, we dared to dream to change the world. We wished to build technology that will revolutionise something, we wanted to make music and poetry that will soothe many hearts and make people fall in love, we craved that our paintings grace the walls of the best galleries around the world.

We didn't want a paycheck with a lifespan from 26th to 2nd of the next month. We didn't aspire to just get by. We dared to do the things our fathers couldn't even dream about.

Our crime was that we thought we were a little above humans — the kinds of humans that graced our streets as we grew up: the tailor, the guy who cuts the family's hair, the deacon in church who rode on a bicycle to work in tarry at another man's house. We were the jade-green shoe laces on black worn-out canvases. Or, so we thought and believed.

Then the reality of not being empowered enough hit us. Some on us gave in, settled at the secretariats. Some of us held unto those dreams, when it was least feasible, in a way that ate on us; wearing our well beaten dreadlocks and a guitar pack everywhere we went, becoming a symbol of what not to become, for the next generation of kids on that same street. That street we once thought we will conquer... we were better than. We won't cut that hair because we will feel we succumbed to this society we are so very sure we should advice. And somehow we sought solace in the bliss of not being aware. That smell of nicotine and marijuana as we walk by testifies against us in the court of public opinion. Somehow we accept with the jury: we lost.

And yet some of us stick to our realistic hurdle, aspiring to be at 27 what we thought we will be at 17. We learnt to shut out the pressures from without even when we're not so sure within we're on the right path. We hope our hard and honest work earns us the respect we deserve. Ultimately, we hope to be vindicated someday, one day.

To you, my brother, 27, 37, or 67, you're not in this alone. Push on!

_{Photo by Stephen Wheeler on Unsplash}

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I just dug this one from my Facebook, from two years ago. I felt so much nostalgia reading this. This time I read it like someone else wrote it, and it felt very different. So I thought I should share it here. Maybe someone would find value in it.