It’s 9am on a busy Saturday morning and I’m considering that the only time I get to squeeze out my toothpaste properly, from the bottom up, is on weekends. That’s when I finally smoothen and straighten out a week’s worth of wrinkles and perfunctory squeezes from the side, front, wherever.
This week was a particularly tiring one. I was kept going by a particularly potent synergy of tourine and caffeine (for the uninitiated – Red Bull in the morning, coffee later in the day).
Eventually, as my body woke up after a few vigorous brushes, my mind shifted to a completely unrelated topic, as rambling minds often do. I ruminated on the subject of integrity. Not the kind commonly associated with moral rectitude, but a certain quality that describes a person whose every part is in sync, a man who lives out what he says and who is who he says he is. A man whose actions follow the logical progression of his desires, dreams and thoughts and who possesses a certain measure of singularity and predictability.
I have often found that we are quick to state our position on a matter or express desires, but not as quick to do what it takes to establish them. A person desires professional success but goes to bed exhausted every night without reading a single material that will advance his cause. That cannot be integrity. It must lie within the realm of something else. A man desires to marry Miss World but cannot afford to spend the requisite $1,000 a month on cosmetics to maintain her premium visage. He desires a freak in bed, an uninhibited feminine creation but cannot abide confident women who are at the top of their game. He decries his racist treatment in a foreign country but will deny his daughter’s right to marry from a tribe not his own. A woman desires only the rich & successful; the tall, dark and handsome but is 30 pounds overweight.
If cause truly leads to effect and sowing begets reaping, perhaps we are all delusional or perhaps very very hopeful (translate foolish). Why do we want parts of people and resist accepting the whole -when the seeming undesirables are a critical component of the whole. It is every factor working together that produces the whole. The cons provide a background from which the pros are projected and if the cons are totally annihilated, will the whole still remain?
Perhaps I speak from an uninformed, female perspective, for I find that within the context of relationships, men are always “hopeful” of comprises while women “think” they can change a man. Pray tell, if God did not succeed in changing a man for 30 odd years, what sort of “bottom power” does a woman hope to exert that will perform this feat literally overnight?
I find that it’s quite plausible that many times, we do not even “see” the inconsistencies and lack of integrity. Many times, we aren’t aware anything’s wrong. Perhaps it’s because our thinking has been conditioned to believe and live a lie. Perhaps we are too proud to admit that we are lacking. Perhaps it is culture or religion (not faith) that blinds us. I find that culture and religion will make a man irrational. Having been steeped in them since infancy, he has gradually become programmed. In all honesty, he knows no better. It is only when he opens his heart to understanding and wisdom, when he opens his eyes, when he receives knowledge, when he queries his elders and steps away from the known to the unknown, when he embraces the simple principles of faith, truth, loyalty and such stuff that span cultures and peoples that he can finally become whole.
I so much long to meet people who are quite simply who they are. People who strive to be the best they can be, not the best “someone else”. I long to converse with an individual who will heartily confront the tough questions instead of brushing them aside. Someone who will narrow in on the important and not the fashionable. A Braveheart, a Patriot, an Arthur.
If knowledge and environment are the two things that save us from ourselves, then I pray that God (yes I do believe in Him) will continually grant me the faculty to seek and love knowledge and the strength to escape from every stifling environment. As I grow and mature; as I change and evolve, may my life be an inspiration to many, may my words sear and challenge paradigms and may I never lose my way in this undulating journey we call life.(All this from a toothpaste tube? Na....!)
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