We live in a society where people want to have, and to have at whatever cost, as long as they have. A friend of mine once told me. “Dis Windhoek hierso, nobody cares how you got it as long as you have it.” But is that really the case, after all is said and done?
Yes to the rest of us it might not matter how you got it, maybe? And sometimes we don’t know when you have it, because you’ve faked it for too long so much so that we don’t really know anymore. But do you really want us to believe that it doesn’t matter to you at all?
When the curtains finally close and lights turn off, when you are left alone with only your thoughts, do you ever listen to them? Your conscience searing through you and all you really want is to shut your soul up and go to sleep, so you turn to alcohol and drink your sorrows away for the night, just to wake up the next morning to the very same questions/doubts/pain/feelings of worthlessness that you have about yourself.
So you wash your face with make-up, put on a fake smile as you begin to announce to the world that you are happy. Are you happy with yourself? Is it really the world that you are trying to convince, or is it yourself? We may be able to deceive the world, but we can never lie to ourselves. If something is dying inside us every day as we live, then we’re not living, we’re just existing.
Is your conscience bothering you? What is your conscience saying? Unfortunately we can never silence that voice deep down inside of us that seems to always point out right from wrong. If we could, maybe then we would make ourselves feel alive even though we really are not.
The truth is that we may not know exactly where we should be yet, but we know where we are not supposed to be. Please don’t trade your soul for riches, your dignity for mac lipstick and your integrity for fame, Because in the end you will still have yourself to live with, your conscience to deal with.
There is more to life than material things, BUT please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we should dig a hole in the ground and dump all our material possessions in there, because there is more to life than that. No! But what are material possessions when you don’t sleep at night? What is a ruby woo lipstick worth when you test positive one day? What are 5,000 likes on facebook worth when you go to bed hungry, because you spent the last N$800 on a dress that you can only wear once, because it’s on Instagram?
Mathew 16:6: “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” How far are you willing to go to gain riches?
Is this life,0 my dear friends? Have we been reduced to technological beings, which only live for the snapshot? A generation that will watch a man drown because they are too busy capturing the moment on their phones; a world where the naked woman is valued more than the one who is clothed.
A generation that will not cover their father’s sin, but instead publish it and make a mockery of it in public. Where is our respect? A society, where the poor are reduced to mere objects for fame, where we buy them bread but we have to announce to the whole world and say: “you didn’t have food, but I fed you”.
Why are you feeding me? Is it really for me, or is it only so that the world can praise you? If the world didn’t praise you, would you still feed me? Why do we show off our beautiful shoes and not the old and torn ones?
It is not wrong to encourage others to give to those that are in need – not at all – and there is a huge difference between encouraging and looking for praise. Encouragement says ‘let’s do it’, while looking for praise says ‘I did it’.
…OK enough about that. I was saying that we live in a society where a young girl is the reason why a married man’s children don’t go to good schools because this young girl (who has a list of other suitors waiting in line) wants an apartment, Brazilian hair and perfume in order to intimidate her friends, a society where this man has to meet her demands, otherwise she will officially dump him and embarrass him.
But somehow he is not embarrassed of the fact that he is hurting his wife and children! A society where married men fear losing their side-chicks more than their families? Where is our dignity? A society where the wedding day is far more important than the marriage itself? So I come back to the question again, does it really not matter to you, how you got it as long as you have it? Who are you really fooling, yourself or others? Do they even care?
* Sesilia Nekwaya is a young economist at the Bank of Namibia whose dream is to make a difference in someone’s life, whether big or small.