By B.N Wendo
‘Be quiet now, and wait, it may be that the ocean one, the one we desire so to move into and become, desires us out here longer on land. A little longer…’
Rumi, from a bowl fallen from the roof
The modern world, in its fervor for haste, reviles patience and maturity. Listen to the most revered motivational speakers and one senses a vainglorious scoffing at natural growth and meticulous metamorphosis.
“The human mind is infinite,” they say. “There is no obstacle to its limits.” Let us do this! We are going to do it! We’ll never give up! Until it works!
But lo! How destructive it has been. We have churned a lot of mediocrity and calamity in the world because we don’t wish to compare our meagre abilities with the Herculean work that we wish to behold. We demand it fits in our simplicity, and not the other way round.
There is a diminutive voice that whispers inside us whenever faced with overwhelming tasks. “You’re not ready!” How frustrating! Passion demands that we achieve glory and perfection. The human will demands blindness to the complexities of a task, and to overcome the reasonable demon that tethers our abilities. The demon that focuses on the mountain before us, calculatively measuring its unscaleability and the paucity of our strength.
The desire to achieve something is always encountered with a depressing feeling of inadequacy and unreadiness. Yet, a tome of books have sought out to advise us on how to overcome this weakness. It is a weakness, they emphasize. A defect. Something peregrine, therefore erasable in our code.
But it has not always been easy. Simply being indignant at our glaring inability to do great things cannot imbue us with the exigent aptitude to do them. It is also useless to minimize the intricacy of a task to conform to our scanty capabilities. Let’s say for example; here is a really Daedelian philosophy text. Incomprehensible to many. Even prosaic to the incurious mind. And here I am. A man with limited or no knowledge on the simplest of philosophical jargon, methods or basics. I will definitely flip a few pages and realize it is hard to read it. Ordinarily. It would be hard. But would affirming myself or denouncing my incomprehension make the text any less incomprehensible? Certainly not. And neither would willfully misinterpreting the text make it comforting.
Therefore, if intuition really dictates to us that we are unready to take on something and fully actualize it to satisfaction, then certainly we are unready. And should there be a vilification of this fact? Not at all. Being unready simply demands we understand one thing: this task is heavy and contains a template of certain expectations. And it would be better for one to grow in skill and in experience before we could do it and say, “Yes!”
Initially, I felt contemptible of people who told me that I was incapable of handling certain tasks based on an assessment of my abilities. I hurled away books that I could not understand and scoffed at them, promising never to touch that filth. I was wrong. I thought the world was always at my disposal. And it had to serve me with what I needed. But whenever I thought I could handle these brilliant ideas that got spun in my mind, I got stuck. I could not finish. And I became even more frustrated and resentful of those works, and myself. All this, the inability to appreciate how overwhelming the world is. And how demanding of our change and growth it is.
I decided to change. And it feels better now. When I have a brilliant story idea, I assess whether it would be impactful with the limited skill I have. Or whether it would need to be set aside until I have polished those ideas, nibbled some experiences with more cathartic effect, or read a little more. If I feel I do not understand what a certain book or philosophy espouses, I wait for the right time. With time, I will possess a stronger set of molars to grind them with ease.
But this feeling of inadequacy does not demand stagnation. It requires motion. If a certain landscape requires more momentum to ascend, go out there and seek out that momentum. Learning is growth. Not a miraculous leap. And growth can only be propelled by intentful intake of edifying material.
Acknowledging inadequacy does not mean lacking conviction in fear of making error. The crust of knowledge should not be trodden upon as though it was made of friable egg shells. Fear no error. But fear no change. Those mistakes could be lessons needed to make you grow a notch higher into finally realizing new truths.
And don’t listen to Facebook sophists. There are people here who have read a few texts and are satisfied with the perception they received from them. And view anyone else who has not been exposed to that view, or those who don’t understand it, as deplorables. They simply cannot feel the creaking weight of the world. They have it in their palms. Don’t be ashamed. Postpone it. You’ll understand it when time is right.
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