When you pick up a gold trinket in all its beauty, was forged in heat. In the kiln, at the end of the gold-making process you find a dross of dirty settlements in the bottom of the cauldron.
…And the gold emerges from sediments of impure and not-so-pretty backdrop.
But those who wear gold have beautiful smiles.
In the thought chain of some people, those who are going through pains one way or the other may have done something wrong. As
Africans our cultural narratives seem to have affected the way we view so many things. There would always be a reason why things are the way they are.
I found out that sometimes things are the way they are to make you become who you were meant to be.
From personal encounters, pains and adversity helped shape my character and enriched the quality of my optics.
I know how childless parents feel.
You can tell the emotional and social trauma single mothers go through. To be a grown man without a job or to have lost one in a crunching economic situation.
Time and again we meet with circumstances that whittle our ego and rack our sense of peace, more often takes a big slice off our sense of personal pride and dignity because our failure to attain the heights others have attained so effortlessly as peers, could even put one down emotionally for a while. Should not though!
Had people tried to compare you with your peers and classmates and contemporaries with whom you seem perpetually unable to sprint out of their shadows, because side by side with them you seem small?
All you worked hard to acquire was snatched out of sight in what seem like a slow-motion mid-life crisis?
The accompanying experience to someone going downhill is often the ghost of loneliness.
You only realise half-way through the journey the fact that you are all alone through the dark tunnel that seem to have no foreseeable end. Where are all the people and faces I have always known?
They did not leave you because they hate you. It was for you to find yourself and to assign yourself an unmistaken identity of who you are and the power of your self-worth.
And you are not smiling!
These are events but who are you?
Who you are is the Gold. The end-product. The fine outcome through the seasons of adversity.
Sometimes we lose sight of who we are becoming and tend to put our mind and thoughts on the seasons that is bringing us to the final moments of triumph and glory.
That final moment of Glory is that through it all you have emerged a solid, unwavering character forged in gold. You have left behind in your past a huge pile of who shouldn’t have been.
The sulking, shy, ever-so-dependent, confused, distorted and fearful person is now stoutly established in the turf of his own grounds. Strong, decisive, plain-talking with an ever-strong vision that can see through every fog and certain of the promise of a great end.
Gold is the standard of precious things in the world’ ratings.
Because you have been through it all, you can have a smile even in the midst of the storm.
And it is a permanent smile. Because nothing can ever take it away! You won!
Those that left you in the seasons of adversity can now come back because you have a story, a winning story to say to those who once were like you.
