I am trying to get used to this place after more than thirty years


In the thirty of my age at the time I wrote these words, and the forty three years of this moment, I have not been able to consider myself fully at home in the world. I am not like a religious believer who holds that his world is only a passing phase, or in the Yoruba or Igbo saying that the world is a market place where we come to trade/buy and sell and return to our homes. The problem is that I don’t feel fully at home here and I can not hold onto any conviction of where hope is. What Korner would describe as an existential sense of awareness, where one’s concern is not with the particulars of being but with the act of being in itself. I revel in the strong pleasures of wrestling the mind around ideas, the sweet and strong blooded pleasures of the contact with glistening bodies where the senses are electrified in most memorable conjunction of self with self, my relationship with the woods and forests in which I like to walk rejuvenate me, the love of my family and others is vital to me, but at times the whose arena of human engagement in which I am an actor seems an escape from something profound which we avoid and refuse to acknowledge even though it stares us in the face. Where do we come from on our entry into this place of pain and fulfilment and where shall wee go when we have to quit the stage? The various answers given are inspiring but can any of them be proven? Can we in full volition go into whatever world id said to be entered by those who leave us behind and return to tell the story? Can we develop a method for achieving this which we can all learn? Which I can learn/Until that happens, I remain a citizen of this place/great place but an outsider within it, a person stranded on the earth, who seems to sense the presence of the stars but can not see them.