WHAT REALLY IS FREEDOM (II)

... continued from a previous post:

 

          In the pursuit of real freedom, you must master yourself in the specific field you know is your life’s goal.  Armed with a broad understanding in that field and moving towards achieving definite goals you have set; your independence both in choice of what you want and finance becomes a reality.  There is no such thing as luck and chance when it comes to being free.  I have always told people both at formal and informal meetings that it is when preparation meets opportunity that success occurs.  With success comes a level of freedom where you can make choices without consulting someone else.

          I will give you a good illustration to drive this point home.  Let us imagine that while you were browsing through the day’s newspaper, you stumbled on an advertisement for the post of a Civil Engineer in one of the construction firms in your city.  If you never read Civil Engineering in your college years, and acquired a degree in that field, no amount of luck can earn you that job even if you apply.  Why?  You were not prepared for that job because you never read that course in school!

          In life, no amount of luck will take you to the top if you have not adequately prepared to get the freedom that abounds in life.  While we were looking at the life of George Best at the beginning of this chapter, it occurred to me that he enjoyed a measure of freedom in his finances and choices (even though the choices were wrong) because he worked on his football talent and took him to the level he got.

          I will close this piece with the story of Diego Armando Maradona.  He is touted as the Best Footballer of all times.  He debuted in professional football in 1975 and played his farewell match in November of 2001.  Throughout a quarter of a century, Maradona influenced a multitude of people including some of the top footballers today.  Parallel to his brilliant skill, the Argentine soccer player has stirred global controversy of unmatched magnitude.  Regardless of his addiction to cocaine, he failed doping tests and his wile on-pitch actions, Diego Maradona is still regarded as the most skillful footballer of all time.  From a technical point of view, Maradona’s match is yet to be born.  He is a complete master of the ball and keeps it under his control at all times, even while running at full speed.

          Maradona exercised unrestricted freedom and fell headlong into drugs and life generally on the fast lane.  Besides his two daughters (Dalma and Giannina) from his former wife, Claudia Villafane; he has a child out of wedlock by the name of Diego Armando Junior from Christiana Sinagra while other women are suing him for child support.

          The question before you now is this:  what kind of freedom do you want?  Real freedom or freedom for self-indulgence that has no responsibilities attached?  The education and knowledge I am advocating you get on your road to real freedom is to ensure the sustainability of your freedom when you eventually get there.  The next chapter presents us with more reasons why freedom is not free…

What really is Freedom?

          You must have heard of one of the best footballers ever to come out of Northern Ireland.  He was George Best.  George Best was simply a legend.  Forget Pele, Maradona, Keegan, Cruyff, Roberto Baggio, Zinedine Zedane, Lionel Messi or all the Ronaldos; ditch Papilo Kanu Nwankwo or Austin Jay-jay Okocha.  George combined everything these had individually, and more.  He was explosive, on and off the ball, could read the game exceptionally and win games single-handedly.  He could dribble past defenders as though they were standing still, and had the balance and swerve of a ballet dancer.  He could tackle as hard as Nobby Stiles, was two footed and could head as powerfully and accurately as much bigger players.  Most of all, George was total entertainment with a ball on a football pitch, who thrilled fans with often unorthodox moves to either score or set up goals.

          George Best was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on May 22, 1946.  He played for his country, Northern Ireland and Manchester United.  He scored 178 goals in 466 appearances for his Old Trafford club, Manchester United and scored 10 goals for Northern Ireland in 37 national caps.

          While enjoying such unparallel success on the field of play, George Best himself confessed that whatever he wanted he got.  He indulged in all forms of worldly pleasures – cars, travels and women.  His life degenerated into alcoholism, bankruptcy, a prison sentence for drink-driving and eventually a controversial liver transplant.  Asked what happened to all the money he had earned, Best replied: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars.  The rest I just squandered”.  What did freedom expressed in this manner fetch him?

          His fame and abundant skills indeed fetched him money and got him whatever he wanted.  However, in the twilight of his life leading to his passing away in 2005, George Best was a shadow of himself.  He was a sick man and looked 80 years at the age of 59.  His own father, Dickie, 87 years old, survived him and he died wretched without any virtuous legacy except for eulogies that poured in from virtually everybody who had followed his phenomenal playing career.

          When he passed away, the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair led tributes to the man he called “probably the most naturally gifted footballer of his generation, one of the greatest footballers the UK has every produced.  Anyone who has seen him as a football fan will never forget it.”  Hiw own Republic of Ireland Prime Minister at the time, Bertie Ahern said “George should be remembered as the very best at what he did.  He was quite simply a  football genius”.  Check out what Sir Bobby Charlton, his former Manchester United team-mate said about him:  “George made an immense contribution to the game, and enriched the lives of everyone that saw him play”.  A minute’s silence was observed at every Premiership football match the weekend of his passing.

          All the success he achieved as a footballer were swallowed up by his unrestricted freedom.  George was the architect of the ill health that killed him.  His indulgence in drugs and alcohol took a heavy toll on his health and the result was death.  Even though his passing was heavily mourned as the entire Irish nation was moved by his death like no other in the life of that nation – the simple fact was that he authored his life to end tragically.

          He thought the freedom money and fame brought him was for him to do whatever pleased him.  He was actually in bondage.  Real freedom emanates from knowing the true meaning of life generally and specifically your own particular purpose for living.  For you to lay claim to freedom, you must start by knowing who you are and what you are supposed to be doing on this earth.  I am not sure George Best ever asked himself this all important question.  If he never asked, it’s possible someone had tried to call his attention to this.  It is also possible that he ignored answering the question because of his warped understanding of what freedom is.  He must have consigned the concept of freedom to mean being at liberty to do whatever you like at any time you want without recourse to the responsibilities such acts were sure to bring.

          George Best had a contemporary in Pele.  Today, Pele is a living legend and a really free man because he knew the responsibilities of freedom and chose the best way to utilize the choices riches and fame brought his way.

          In the boxing world, there are two legends as well.  Mohammed Ali and ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson.  Ali chose responsible freedom while Tyson chose the unrestricted path.  Both are still alive as I write – one is a celebrated icon whining and dining with celebrities and carries with him a grace of notoriety while the other s a struggling man seeking relevance.

          Mike Tyson’s history is pathetic.  At the age of 20, he became a Heavyweight Boxing Champion in 1986.  He was mentored by Italian Manager, Cus D’Amato, who moulded a freakishly sized 12-year-old into a heavyweight contender.  By the time he won the championship, D’Amato had already passed away.  At 22, Tyson’s other longtime associates had either died or been jettisoned as Don King invaded the champion’s life.  But, without trainer Kevin Rooney, who was sacked by Tyson himself, a man who knew the D’Amato formula so well, he began to struggle, culminating in his 1990 loss to James ‘Burster’ Douglas in Tokyo.

          In 1991, one Desiree Washington accused Tyson of rape but people didn’t take the threat seriously, but in February 1992, he was in court and listening to a guilty verdict that ended phase one of his boxing career.  He spent his next three years in jail.  Released in 1995, the former champion returned to the ring.  He reclaimed his championship in a crushing rematch with Frank Bruno.  He was however stopped by Evander Holyfield twice in 1996 and 1997.  Lenox Lewis also demystified him later.

          The fact that this man was not able to control his freedom can be traced to his very unpleasant, lonely and rough background.  At 38, Tyson didn’t know who his father was.  He said: “Sometimes, I don’t know who the hell I am.  My mother said it was Jimmy Kirkpatrick, but my birth certificate says Purcell Tyson.  How embarrassing it was, at 38, to try to get a passport only to find out I don’t know who my father is”.

          Inspite of that, you must realize that it is not what happens to you that matters but what happens in you that counts.  Your background could be rough and hard, but you have a responsibility to turn things around.  The sea could be rough but you can re-direct your sail.  There are many people with very unpleasant foundations but have gone back to lay a better foundation.

          This is how Tyson has passed a verdict on his own life with the following statement:  “I will never be happy.  I believe I’ll die alone.  I would want it that way.  I’ve been a loner all my life with my secrets and pain.  I’m really lost, but I’m trying to find myself.  I’m really a sad, pathetic case.  My whole life has been a waste – I’ve been a failure.”

          He made a statement of fact but he didn’t need to close the chapter on his life.  But that is the frustration that can befall a man who was never prepared for the kind of freedom that people like Tyson got when he became a celebrity.  He could never adjust his personality to the demands of being one of the world’s most famous sportsmen.

          For the avoidance of doubt, there are two major kinds of freedoms.  The first kind which is in common practice is that which you exercise without responsibilities.  I call it playing around with your life while waiting for a sure pay-day.  John C. Maxwell said, if you play today, you will surely pay tomorrow.  It is common sense to pay today so you could play tomorrow.  In other words, your paying today is the responsibility you take to ensure your playing tomorrow which is the real freedom.

          Your real freedom comes when you have properly been schooled to understand and appreciate the virtues of education, acquiring knowledge, developing yourself to reaching your potentials and taking deliberate steps to do what is required in order to achieve your set goals in the light of your ultimate vision.

(.... to be continued)

Write the Vision Down

“… Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.” – Habakkuk 2:2

            A few years ago, I began to realize that if I must move from the level of mediocrity to excellence in my life, there are few things I must not compromise.  One of such few things is the habit of constant reading.  I began to develop a crazy culture of reading and this led me to begin to build a personal library unconsciously.  This realization that a reader is a leader made me to begin to spend about 25% of my monthly income on books of various subjects ranging from leadership, management, biographies, history, motivation to religion.   As I read these books, my worldview began to expand, I began to also get exposed to new levels of knowledge I would otherwise not get from my small circle.  As time went by, my environment began to look small for me to operate – I became restless and my purpose became clearer and people thought I was getting mad when I started practicing at my new level of knowledge which they could not relate to.

            The brief experience I shared above came into being because I came in contact with a host of written materials.  Many of the people I read their books live thousands of miles across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean.

            I was never in contact with them and may never meet some of them in person.  As a matter of fact, some of them are dead yet what they wrote spoke to me and changed my life.  There is power in the written material.

            Many people have a picture of what they want to do in the future but have not yet developed the discipline of writing down what that picture in their mind consists.  A Chinese proverb says “the faintest pen is sharper than the brightest brain”.  The item that is written down except deliberately destroyed or erased has the potential to speak to someone thousands of years after the writer has ceased to exist on planet earth.

            Anytime you write down what you have in mind, it takes a life of its own and it has more power and potential of becoming a reality.  Even Divinity writes down His thoughts.  Moses spent 40 days on Mount Sinai so God can write the 10 Commandments on the tablets of stone for the children of Israel.  The Bible records that these Commandments on the tablets of stone were written down by God Himself.  If you cannot develop a culture of writing down things, you will not go far in realizing whatever vision it is you have.

            In the quote we have at the head of this chapter, God asked his prophet, Habakkuk to write down the vision he had even so that those who will pursue the vision can have a road-map.  Once writen, a direction is established and a focus is in view.  If you can capture your vision in a written format, the vision is half achieved.  How do you pursue what you cannot constantly see?  What you have written is a living testimony of the dream in your heart.

            In Africa, writing is always seen as a boring activity.  It is the reason why development has been slow in coming to our clime.  We have the tendency to operate without clues.  No road-maps, no guide or governance – just clueless, disorganized lifestyle.  No tangible and reasonable success whether at the personal or corporate levels can be achieved that way.  Write down your vision!

            I challenged my Wednesday class in Church recently to develop individual 10 year plans for themselves and begin to work towards it.  Very few people have an idea of how their lives will end.  It is always because they have no blueprint.  Like I mentioned earlier, we abdicate that responsibility to God and expect things to be dropped on our laps.  Forget it, nothing will fall from the sky that way.  You have to create a platform for such occurrences.  Write down your plan!  It gives you focus and reduces stress.

            With a written plan for a year, for instance, you can say for certain what you need to get done in January; what’s on the card for February and what you should be doing in June.  With such a blueprint, you can have a daily “to-do-list” for how to work towards your monthly goals which should work you up to achieving the annual projections.  Without a plan, you will be rudderless, like a ship without a sailing plan and a pilot without a compass or a flying route – you will be lost in the race of life.

            Can you imagine entering a shopping mall without a shopping list?  Whatever you see becomes interesting to buy.  Why?  You did not establish a focus before you ventured into the mall.

            In our vision orientation practice, if you do not have plans in your life, other people’s plans will influence and dictate how your life will be run.  Written plans make you proactive about running your life – people without plans react to life.  They act only when circumstances trigger them to act.  That is a very frustrating way to live.

True Love

Love as a concept in Christian parlance is not a new fad.  The love which our Lord Jesus Christ has for the world motivated Him to be subjected to all the indignities He suffered on the cross and died.   John 3:16 is about the most popular scripture known to all Christians.  It is a verse of the Bible that summarizes the mission of Christ to the earth and its accomplishment. 

            It is against this backdrop that a critical look at the way love is perceived and practiced today is worrisome to me and many other concerned observers.  The idea of love is either completely misunderstood by majority of Christians or when understood, is not practiced possibly because of the selflessness and sacrifices that characterizes its true expression.

            The advent of the information revolution has also done a great damage to a balanced understanding of love.  A vast majority of today’s youths see love from the perspectives expressed on TV screens and fictional love books.

            This book is born out of a sincere desire to bring sanity to bear on the varied and skewed understand people have about love and its true expression in line with the purpose of God.  True love possesses the greatest potential to bless humanity when expressed in its true form because the entire purpose and plan of God is hinged directly on it.

            On Saturday, September 2, 2006, I honoured an invitation from the Youths of The Open Christian Assembly (TOCA) in Kano to speak to them during a breakfast Seminar during their 2006 Youth Week.  I am yet to forget one crucial statement I made that also surprised me.  I said “I have a strong desire to affect people in ways that may not be conventional.  You may not like it and you don’t need to like it.  It is my passion and I can’t be stopped but even if you want to stop me, then you need to kill me!”

            At the end of the programme, the Executive team of the Youth Fellowship gave me a gift.  As expected, it was a book (I wonder why I rarely get other kinds of gifts besides books!).  The title of the book si Romancing the Divine by Don Nori and it is a story about True Love.  Before then, I had completed the manuscript of this book.  The thoughts shared by Don Nori in his book is as radical as the life of love that I have always desired to live out both with people around me and with God.  It has caused more conflict than I had bargained but I have stuck to it because I believe in it and I see results.  I want to share a few of such thoughts as I gleaned from the first few pages of Don Nori’s Romancing the Divine:

How noble true love is!  How invincible!  How pure!  How innocent!  Love simply comes, often undetected even by the one overtaken by its mysterious powers.  True love.  The lonely covet its reality.  The arrogant flaunt its presence.  The ignorant snub its wonder.  It is as illogical as anything can be.  It is hopeless to describe it and folly to shun it.  The greatest philosophers have sought to define it.  Religion has tried to buy it.  Many have tried to elude it.

Love is as hopeless to understand as it is impossible to deny.  Yet reason and logic are helpless against love, for it is a most formidable foe of the mundane and the average.  True love, you see, dares to go places where reason cannot thread.  Love sees realities about which philosophy can only hope to dimly speculate.  True love knows what tradition can only distantly remember.

            True love draws the least lovable.  It can make anything a hero.  True love is the sustaining power of the universe itself, yet is so lovely that it abides fully in the hearts of those foolish enough to respond to its rapturous invitation to come.

            Love without legalism; commitment without control; fullness without fear; relationship without religion – the very mention of such possibilities brings feelings of exhilaration and hope, for they are the deepest yearnings of our souls.  They are the essence of true love.

            Love practiced like stated above frees you to reach out to the best in God and reach the deepest soul of any man or woman you interact and relate with.  That is the aspiration I desire to fulfill in my life; what about you?

            As you read the thoughts expressed in this book, I implore you to open your heart and dedicate your life to the Love of God and Love for fellow human beings.  Real life revolves around this and desiring to live otherwise will leave you with many regrets.

            I desire to see lives changed as a result of this message.  Do not read only for gathering more information because the driving force behind this inspiration is beyond that.  Read for a revolution of love in your life and you will never regret doing so.