ILLUMINATION with CREATIVE MIND08169276283

ENLIGHTENING MINDS THROUGH THE VOICE OF THE PEN

THE DEAD ALIVE!

May his gentle soul rest in peace was the sad statement of prayer that brought me back from the long voyage of thought I had gone on as I stood still like the statue of a national hero. Earlier, I had watched my friend as he was dressed up wrapped in a white shroud, with cotton wool in his ears and nostrils.

At the memorial service, I heard various tones of mourning filled the air. People narrated their encounters with the dead while he was still living. Some described him as an easy-going boy; they said his humility and kindness were second to none. Others said he was too young and promising to die and they lamented that death chose wrong by picking the boy Francis. I personally believed that his playful, jovial and friendly disposition to people were golden. I remembered Francis jokingly threatening to break my leg three days earlier on the field of play if I tried dribbling past him again and coming to me less than a minute later, telling me to forget his threat as it was empty. I remembered him sharing his dreams of becoming a medical doctor with me and his perfect way of mimicking the he-goat's sound which finally earned him the alias Obuko among his close friends. Then my focus returned to the environment, the cemetery, and tears rolled down my cheek uncontrollably as we all left Francis in the six feet apartment he would occupy for all of eternity.

It is not a subject of debate that most of you my readers set your eyes on the boy Francis neither during his life time nor when he stepped into his wooden coffin. But you know, however, that Francis like other sleeping soldiers lies with his eyes closed to the mundane things of this world as he waits patiently for his body to decay and become sand, adding to the earths already plenteous grains. We went

our different ways, and each person tried to quickly forget the whole scene, even though the tears hadnt yet dried from our faces.

Sadly, Francis death only kept us individually sober for all of three hours, after which we all resumed our perpetual bouts of fun-catching consuming alcohol, taking illicit drugs, smoking, gossiping, backbiting, etc.

At the risk of sounding odd, I posit that whether we admit it or not we are all dead. We watch a man as he was lowered into his eternal home; and fail to see that his physical death affords us a glimpse of life in its true form, its emptiness. He is the dead man in the lower apartment and he could see the world in its true color but the rest of us, the dead men who occupy the apartment on top go about brandishing riches with our empty heads. With blind eyes that show us that life is full of goodies and deaf ears that keep on hearing how to build fifty room mansions and not how to get prepared for the six feet underground home. They remain there in silence but it is when they remain silent about the things of this life that they cry out to its realities. We go about with dead minds packed in living bodies and fail to realize that every information we get through our senses are mostly fake, hence damnant quod non intellegunt (we condemn what we do not understand) while those things are actually what we should struggle to know.

In that box lies a living man in a dead man's form, though not physically alive but knowledge and intelligence lingers on with his memory. Who is going to call the dead man walking about with the wrong attitude towards life to order? The living man we buried shakes his head upon seeing the world in its true look. Death has afforded him the opportunity to die physically in order to live and see the realities of life but the dead man on top is engrossed at the exercise of vanity he engages in with the belief that he is alive and wise enough to live life to its fullest.

No wonder it is said that this world is a strange land for we never understand what we see, feel, say and hear. It is only in the life beyond that we feel at home. culled from www.oluwaseguncreativemind.blogspot.com