The continuous nature of Nature
Hey friend, nice to have you back. I usually reflect on issues for longer periods before writing about them but I’m trying to be more Agile about stuff before they get stale or irrelevant for my generation. This time we’d share thoughts on time, age, ageing and experience. A bit of this will touch on marriage in the African setting and what role age need/not play in the matter.
Time & Chronology
By now, you may have realized that Time is a figment of our imagination. In an actual sense, there’s nothing like seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades, centuries, etc., rather, what we have is a period of light (day) and another of darkness (night). But as humans, we always find ways of quantifying things (which is a good thing). People created time just to have alignments. Chronology tries to assign timestamps to events which is why we can have such things as birthdays. In the real sense of it, you were just born at a particular instance, and since then, you have been alive. The yearly cycle is a confinement that has little bearing on who you are. I hope you are doing away with what you may consider as your age by now.
Age & Aging
Does it then mean all people are the same, equal, parallel and at par? Not really. Since some were brought into this world by their parents before the others, there’s some probability that they may see some things before those coming after them. But, if those that came later get exposed to more things than their chronological seniors, the age thing is a pure mirage and is irrelevant. Therefore, the younger can be the elder. Citing something one of my professors (Professor Omotosho J.) said to us in class one time: “Hey, you can learn this thing, even better than me. The only reason you feel I’m so good at it is that I’ve studied it for many years, and I’ve been alive before you. If we were born at the same time, some of you here would have probably been far more intelligent than me”. Hence, age and ageing are about experience, not time, as you previously may have thought.
Marriage in Africa
The norm in Africa is for a man to marry a woman ‘younger’ than him, and vice-versa for women. Lol. Here’s the issue, a lot of assumptions are then made, crazy ones at that. One of such is that all people who came into the world first, have better emotional control than those who came later. Another is that they ought to have more resources and influence in the relationship. And yet another, that they are owed some respect because they started existing in flesh before those who came later. Hmm, I’ll leave you to think about the risks that arise from these misconceptions. I also encourage you to shed off any petty biases you may have had towards people because of their chronological existence. I urge you to deal with everyone objectively. Nature has a continuous nature.
Adieu, mes amis.✌😇
