The Bushy Path

“Render help unto others.” This is one of the most popular statements we listen to every day. It’s worth its weight in gold and it’s a statement that everyone has to take to heart. But is everybody eligible to help others? Yes.

Ego can be a cause of downfall for anybody. When you have succeeded in a task or in your career, it is easy to think that you are the best. It is easy to think that you achieved success because you were flawless. Ego can blind you to things that people around you try to warn you about. It is even easy to think that those people are unqualified to offer advice to you because they have achieved much less than you have.

Sometimes, you think about your disadvantaged background. It becomes a source of discouragement to you. You believe that this could be a problem to the achievement of your lofty goals. You think people who have more privileged backgrounds would have it easier to fulfill their dreams and become successful.

No matter how bad a failure you are, you have achieved success in some things. No matter how successful you are, you have also failed in many pursuits. This is common to everybody but we usually differ in the number of failures and successes we have.

In the movies, it is usual to see people solving problems creatively without even trying. It is common to see a protagonist in a movie plot the antagonist’s thought patterns in under a minute of thinking hard. It can make you feel dull in comparison if you have ever tried to find a creative solution in 30 seconds without any success.

In My Sister’s Keeper , by Jodi Picoult, Anna Fitzgerald seeks medical emancipation from her parents. In a court scene, it became necessary for Anna to become a witness and be questioned in front of the judge. The last thing Anna wanted was to be a witness. In fact, she had asked her lawyer about it before the trial just to be sure she would have no involvement in that sense.

Sleep is an activity that is common to all human beings. At least most of the human population sleep at least once in a day. But have we ever asked the question ‘why do we sleep?’ After all, when you sleep, you are doing nothing right? Not exactly. Sleep as a topic went without discussion or investigation for many centuries. So much that most of the findings made from the study of sleep have come in the past twenty-five to thirty years. If you have never asked the question, now is the time to ask why we sleep and why we have to. Why can’t we all go on and on without sleep? Since there is enough work to do? One other question to ask about sleep is ‘how many hours should we sleep?’ Due to challenging situations in many work places and the pressure to perform, many have felt the need to reduce the amount of sleep they get each night.  They think of cutting their daily sleep by two hours and salivate at the amount of work they can get done in two hours. But there is a better s...

The life expectancy in Nigeria, a country of one hundred and seventy (170) million inhabitants, is 53.4 years for men and 55.6 years for women. This means that a man who dies at 53 or a woman who dies at 56 has not died young, he or she has died at the expected age for Nigerians. It is a mind-boggling figure. It is even more mind-boggling when you realise that the country with the lowest life expectancy in Europe, Moldova, has a life expectancy of 71. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.5 years over the period 2010 – 2015 according to the United Nations World Population prospects 2015 Revision. Nigeria is 17 years below the average. Nigeria is also at an abysmal 177th (six places to the last) among the nations in the world on the life expectancy list with an average life expectancy of 54.5 years.