Seasons.

[Excerpt from the book, RELATE]

Earlier this year, I let public my debut unpublished book titled Relate. Copy the link, if you would like to download yourself a copy:

 https://www.scribd.com/document/370586568/Relate-Brad-Odilo-2018

It took me 10 years to put it together, a collective of succinct thoughts and experiences since 2008. Within 3 years I was done with the full manuscript, the consequent years were just the perfectionist in me at play, editing and contemplative rhetoric; however it delayed the book’s release.

The seventh chapter in the book, Seasons, bears some upbeat wisdom that found me rereading my own book. The chapter resonated with the space I currently find myself in, at the crossroads of a new frontier. Someone once said to me that I’m always in a certain “space”. Ordinarily that statement should have been offensive but it was not because it was true-say. Among my other personal labels, I consider myself a dimensional-ist. I’m a sucker of grasping what mode, climate and thus season that I currently occupy and subconsciously will cringe when unaware. The practicality of this translates to an open mindedness to world affairs, politics, economics, and technology and above it all a pursuit of the Creator’s mind at every step.

Over the years, I have observed a distinct pattern in my experience that always delivers true: when a new season dawns, a person is introduced into my life and when it ends the person is moved out of the picture! At times, it may not necessarily be a new person but just someone who has been a distant colleague but then are brought into my inner circle by circumstance.

 “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” – Genesis 8:22 KJV

Seasons affect all of us inevitably. This means that the consideration is not whether or not we will enter a season as much as it should be which season am I in? That takes discernment. Discernment in simple terms is the antonym of suspicion. The stupidest thing you can do in your life is going through life not knowing what season you are in!

If you do not know what’s required of you in a certain space, how then will you place yourself accordingly for advantage? That question correspondingly is followed by another blunt question: who then determines the seasons that come to us? The answer to that should be stupidly simple: the Creator of this universe!

Right now, at this very moment, you are in a certain season; you are also either about to enter a new season or are just leaving another one. A season simply means a particular time-frame clad with certain tangible and intangible mechanisms that can be manipulated for a particular outcome. Subsequently, there are constant changes and transitions happening around you that you have a limited time to seize and adjust to. Adjustments are our constant friend, if you slack on your adaptability you risk being ineffective in the ordering of your life forward.

Do you know what season you are in right now and which one you are about to enter into? Trust me; it’s hugely important that you ascertain correctly this seemingly irrelevant question.

Identify your seasons so as to apply yourself maximally to your advantage!

Where did you get your Coke?

[Photo Credit: Coca Cola Art]

“Excuse me sir, where did you get your Coke?” he asked me.

Context is king.

If in the past 2 months or less you have found yourself in the Southern African country called Zimbabwe, such a question would not be unpopular. The past months has seen a shortage of basic commodities and consumables consequent of several factors among them which include foreign currency shortages on imports and panic buying causing a negative reaction on the markets on supply and demand.

Experts did and still do a great job analyzing such factors and reporters are also fairly objectively. I’m neither an Economist nor a Journalist, so this article proceeds not from that motivation and interests of scenarios that have been arising resultantly but from the seeming-random question about my beloved Coke.

I was waiting for fellow team mates to arrive; we had an informal celebration for our organisation’s 5^th Anniversary. I was there before the agreed time, so I was early (on time is late and before time is early). It was an Ice Cream shop and I got there with my about half indulged Coke in a PET bottle and I placed it on the table. As I sat inside the sitting area, nonchalantly, he stepped up to me. He was wearing spectacles, a rolled up long sleeved shirt and dark trousers with black shoes. Initially i thought he had recognized me from somewhere and he wanted to make a greeting. He mumbled a few words, now in hindsight I assume that was his greeting; I stood up as courtesy, staring at him expectantly for some deep conversation starter he went on instead to ask me about my drink! The chat that followed lasted about a minute, a basic exchange which ended with me telling him that he actually needed to drive about 7 kilometers away to get it.

It got me thinking and led me to realize a rather silly but profound principle on relating:

People come to you for what you have!

The initiative to approach someone is based upon an intrinsic assessment that the person that I’m about to engage possesses something that aligns to what I want or need with what’s on my agenda. This forms the basic precedent for why we relate: to meet needs for we are a needy species. Depending on the avenue an individual then decides to use so that they acquire what you have, it determines how we respond to and describe them. Needless to mention, there are many other dynamics at play at any juncture of relating that override just what you possess. However, what you have is the basis of a relationship! What you have determines what you can trade for humans make movement on the basis of a demand that someone has that attracts them.

It may seem insipid to actually make such a claim that we relate only because we assess what someone has and then determine our response but it’s true. It may be money, time, kindness, status, ideas, beauty and spirituality. It may also be a negative possession like poverty, disease, bad temper, in the sense of what you actually lack that you should have. In that sense you possess the lack of what you should have.

My submission is a truth that is not enough to validate just by intellectualizing, you have to observe it personally. As you engage people and vice versa, be calculative of what you are trading in terms of what you possess both physically and non-physical. This assessment helps you to understand the reasons why relationships around you exist, also if you have managed to make a correct assessment of what you possess, you will be able to discern a pattern of the relationships that you hold and grasp why that is so.

So when and if someone asks you “where did you get your coke?”

Just know what’s at play, fundamentally.

BR-EXIT.

[Photo Credit: Brexit series for FT. (Pinterest)]

The United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) are leaving the European Union!

In simple terms it is divorcing itself from the relationship it has shared with the rest of the European Union for the past 45 years, which is a coalition of 28 European countries bound by a single market to allow free movement of goods, capital, services and labor.I recommend you visit the BBC Website to get a detailed and simple to understand read up on the whole process and its current update

I have been following the process ever since its commencement in 2016 after citizens voted to leave the Union and it has been forming into an intriguing reality to say the least. I have discovered a lot of parallel insights that are rather personal and I awkwardly feel like the process is directly linked to me.

For starters, the process has been coined the term BREXIT, which is a merge of BRITAIN and EXIT. That sounded a tad familiar for me, I’m BRADLEY and I have been EXITING a lot of familiar spheres and associations that I have become so accustomed to. The personal link was even strengthened with the now set date of exit; 29 March 2019. I was born 29 March. Call it what you may, silly me, but for me that was rather a cool coincidence!

“When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t” – William Temple

So I chose to attach Mr Temple’s quote to validate my naivety and I took it as an answered prayer from my Father in heaven to give me a physical outworking of a spiritual reality that I have been finding myself having to deal with.

Believe it or not but I have learnt tremendous insights on how to maneuver detachments, exits, transitions and a general breaking free from familiar spaces. Odd as it may strike people around me or even you my dear reader, I truly have been enriched and have been finding wisdom in the most rather ‘’foolish” thing of UK leaving the EU.

I will be turning 29 on the 29^th of March 2018 that is 17 days away, that is 1 year short from the 3 decades of existence. I feel old but I’m young as I have ever been and honestly I feel like I’m just about to hit self-actualization, I do not subscribe to Abraham Maslow’s needs of hierarchy but I credit him with some truth to his theory.

Teaching Sunday school class 2 weeks ago however did not help my-feeling-old state, I had the children asking “Uncle, what is a Walk-Man?’’.

At the first ask of that question I thought the little boy was joking but I soon came to the grips that he wasn’t when another little girl came up to ask me the same question. It was a worksheet they had to complete and they had to tick off things that they would need from a list that was given there and how God is able to provide what we need. I had to settle to describe that a Walk- Man was an iPod for old people! In that moment I had an epiphany…… “BRADLEY YOU ARE OLD” Laugh Out Loud!!!

Go back to BREXIT Bradley!

I have gained 5 generalized insights from BREXIT to apply to where I’m at in my life:

• Take your sweet time to consider any attachment to something because if and when there should be a detachment, there are costly consequences.
• In the process of detachment, the structures that would have sustained you will fail you and disappoint you that include the people who will run the systems that will remain.
• Exiting any association or familiar space that you have occupied, you will automatically become a resource to those you will then embrace but a nuisance to those you will leave.
• Never take break ups personal, take them with a pinch of salt, it’s all part of life and living in the ever occurring quest to find balance and fluidity, which is a call of destiny.
• Exits and Entries of relationships are constant happenings that we need to master so that we relate advantageously at every turn so as to maximise our energies.
• It takes time, just as about the same time it took to stay in it, to undo the memories, benefits, disadvantages of a relationship, so be sober minded always, focus on the objective and do not get blinded by the subject.

 

 

We all will experience exits from familiar spaces in this life, it’s in how we will navigate the LEAVING that will determine how well we will grow in the place of our STAYING.