Author: Woozie

, said the sleeve to the heart. 

To the ruffled,  We never really know that we are being hopeful until we find ourselves distraught, crashed under the weight of our own expectations and wondering where we went wrong. The wonderful world of wonder is one we build around our beliefs and perceptions. Our vision, limited to seeing things as we are, constructs real abstractions everywhere we see. …

Maybe if we sang a little louder

The mistake in the messaging might be the idea that desire matters. That if you want something enough, then as follows, it is yours.  The cosmic giggle echoes – it is heard by only one.  The idea that maybe we can want our way into happiness. That we can attain ourselves into actualization. Of the god who watches, judges and…

It’s the sticky stuff

What I’m saying is that the complexities of the macroeconomy are caused by total sum of the simple everyday, everywhere. Or at least is supposed to be. But there is no simple everyday in the face of globalised extractive capitalism. There is only maximisation of margins, bargaining within an inch of our lives to be the maximiser so we may…

An echochamber of hope

In October 1979 Nairobi University students demonstrated against Moi’s one year-old government which they accused of having barred opposition politicians from taking part in that year’s general election. They demanded the reinstatement of Ngugi wa Thiong’o as their professor of literature. Six university student leaders were expelled and the student representative body, the Nairobi University Students’ Organization (NUSO), proscribed as…

Holding brief

. Ideas persist.  They persist because they define something that may define something else that inevitably defines us.  They persist because we are only the little bits that we share with each other, Because we believe in each other, that we can tell this story and, if enough people believe in it then a part of us will live forever. …

Calibrating joy

Sometimes i wonder if they had considered the possibility that you had calculated the risk and decided that the pain from one fall while rocking your chair was worth it for the joy of leaning back, tittering on the edge of danger, testing your ability to trust yourself in small doses.  “Utaanguka.” In a play a poet talks about why…

An ode to baggage

“Without understanding, you cannot proceed.”– Yasiin Bey And the game of life, set up by time itself, is motion. To continue to face the next frame life presents, or else be crushed at a rate of 60 frames per second all because you refuse to let go of the one picture where you saw yourself in a different light.  Let…

Waiting for you

Somewhere in the unknown, beyond the horizon of what you can see, lies an answer. A disappointingly simple, slightly frustrating answer. One that you have been looking for within the bounds of your knowledge since you can remember. You continue to look because you know it exists – you are not wrong. It is out there, somewhere in the realm…

Who, me?

As long as you believe you exist this will continue to be a problem. The nature of problems that stem from our mind is that we carry them with us everywhere we go. Like glasses, they frame what we see, using a lens to correct it for our mind’s eye. In this way, the dissolution of the self is the…

5.

Make peace with the paradox.  Eventually you’ll need to slow down to speed up, become softer to get harder,  feel more to think better,  get stronger to be more kind.  The things you want to move towards will often involve moving in unexpected directions.  Stay nimble, stay agile, stay curious – become.