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![Groking your life makes you more you. A Year To Grok Dick David's Living Eulogy [On Being 28]](https://pawns.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Groking-your-life-makes-you-more-you.-A-Year-To-Grok-Dick-Davids-Living-Eulogy-On-Being-28.jpg "A Year To Grok: Dick David's Living Eulogy [On Being 28] 1")
This felt like the fastest year of my life so far. It genuinely felt like this was still part of last year. At a point, I couldn’t tell what happened this year from what happened last year.
While my last year’s eulogy ended in what felt like a divine script, this year felt like a violent ripping apart of that script by indifferent reality.
The “reality” of many people is hunger, joblessness, and loneliness, just to name a few. But, in reality, we have more food on earth than we can consume, entire industries with opportunities are emerging every day, and there have never been this many people on the surface of the planet, ever.
So, why do the facts conflict with many people’s reality?
As you go through life, you will experience, gain, and lose many things. You will also be seen, addressed, and treated in many ways.
And while all these can lead you to see yourself in different ways, often bending to the whims and manipulation of the world, when you take charge of your identity, you become unshakable.
Hoping for a better life in Nigeria can feel like trying to survive in the Amazon rain forest, butt-naked. It pours problems and bad news like rain. And inflation, like a vicious beast, is always ravaging – the cost of living defies the law of aerodynamics, and the purchasing power diminishes, as the value of the naira falls against the dollar like a coconut from a tree.
So, despite all these, why am I not of the opinion that immigrating (aka “Japa”) is the solution?
We perceive other countries as the proverbial promised lands: clean, safe and functional. Even the internet doesn’t fail to remind us each day of Tokyo’s cherry blossoms, Paris’ romantic cafes, and the Caribbean beaches, where the sand kisses your feet and the breeze wraps around bare skin.
And so, we dream. We wish. We plan to leave.
I love movies that begin with the protagonist exploring the question, “Who am I?”, “What is my purpose?”, or “Do I even have a superpower?”. Especially when they have been singled out as special but don’t know why, yet. Think Neo from the Matrix, Po from Kung Fu Panda, or Harry Potter from, well, Harry Potter.
The compounding effect is a principle that highlights that little by little something big is realised.
They have always tried to reveal themselves to me in fragments, but my own expectations have often warped my interpretation of their intentions. I’ve seen them as malevolent at times, and indifferent at others. But this year, I guess I was able to see that it was all beyond good and bad, and about shaping me into someone better.
You see, every word we speak is laden with meaning. It is the stories of people captured in syllables. It’s events that have happened over and over again. And the experiences of my friends, no matter how unique they might seem (to them or even me), are ubiquitous to humanity. This is also true for my experiences, your experiences, or the experiences of anyone really…
I’m a beginner photographer, albeit obsessed. At the time of writing, I don’t yet own a camera, but that hasn’t stopped me from copiously ingesting photography content and consistently regurgitating them on my WhatsApp status. I probably spend more time sharing striking photographs and photography memes than I do taking actual pictures, which sometimes makes … Read more
