The struggle of our life

Just as you’re about to read this, some voices within you are struggling. One says skip; another says go-on. A different one even says it’d be worth reading; another counters, and says it won’t. That’s how all of life is – life is a race of struggle! We all have many persons within us struggling for their voices to be heard: and the loudest one determines if you’d read this to the end or not.

*Caution: never start reading if you would not struggle to the road’s end.*

Henry Ford once rightly said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

We’re all strugglers in life: both olds and youngs, males or females, slaves or freeborns; saints or sinners – everyone!  You can’t say you’re not, of course you are. Even the dead struggle: either in hell burning, or in heaven struggling with the thought of their relatives in hell. I was told life is a race, like the struggles end while we die, but never! It never ends, and it even started long before our life begins. So, I’d say it as: life is like an unending race that we’re all running. We’re conceived out of struggle; born out of struggle; live by struggling; and die out of struggle; and still struggle after death. That’s why we all wish for faster horses that reduce human struggles. Although, Ford may actually mean car, because he was a car producer and cars are not just faster than horses, they’re the best thing for our twenty-first century burgeoning cities. But below the surface of that statement is a nebulous writh: and that may be Ford’s own way of saying that life is a race of struggle! And of course it’s. If only I’m able to prove that everyone is struggling/racing, then we’ll need faster horses, and then, Ford and I would be right. But if not, I and Ford are wrong altogether.

The school is the best stage that depicts life: because the school is somewhat similar to real life in that they both arrange us into classes and both require heavy struggle to survive. And so life is a school of different seven-classes. No one sits on the fence in life’s school. We all fall into one or more classes of life, and each class with two extreme ends. And even before we enrolled into the school of life, we already started struggling. You don’t know how? I’d show you how. Everyone knows that one sperm fertilizes an egg to make a baby, but not all of us remember so much about child conception from mere biology class. Each time a man ejaculates, he releases about 100 million sperms. Why are so many sperms released when it takes only one to fertilize the egg? The journey from the vagina to Fallopian tube is a very tough one that only few sperms survive. So, experts believe it might be nature’s own way of making sure that only the healthiest sperm fertilizes the egg. And so, to have a healthy baby like you were, you outran 999 million other sperm cells – STRUGGLING! Now you know for sure, that the struggles of life begins before birth.

As we we’re born, the struggle escalated. We got into the first class in the school of life. This is called the young or old’s class. Remember, each class with two extreme ends. At our birthday, one falls at the lower end; where children struggle to grow old and become dominant, and the other end are old people who struggle and really wish to grow younger. Just right then, you also simultaneously belong to another class. It’s the male and female’s class. Your reproductive organs place you in any of these two ends. Here, adult males struggle to please females, and females struggle to please both females and males. Concomitantly, we also belong to one of the two extremes in the third class. That is, the abled and disabled class. Our position here is not permanent, as accidents or other unforeseen circumstances of life change abled-people to disabled at will. And here are the throes in this class. The disabled frays their nerves out of heavy dose of disabilities, and the abled, strive with utmost strength for their ability to find expression.

In the fourth class of life is the heaviest struggle of all. This is called the educated or illiterate’s class. While we started school early enough, others didn’t. And that fact places us into either educated or illiterate’s class. In this class, there is immoderate tussling. The educated are in three groups: the front-row seaters in school who shove to get a glimpse of graduating summa cum laude – and the back-row-seaters who are jostling towards the class exit. During exam, the back-row seaters struggle to sit beside the front-row-seaters, and when separated, they struggle more.  In recap, they still – all – struggle heavily for grades, college admissions, and good jobs. Let’s look deeply at the illiterates’ section, it’s by no great means different to the A-class: as the literate tussle behind the bars of heavy information in the box called school, illiterates struggle behind bars in their prison of unawareness. At another side are the third group of the educated, the informally informed, they simply learnt a skill or a trade, and there was no exam all through their learning period – no competition. But immediately they become masters, they’d realized that the race is not for the swift, for there are several people better than they in the same skill in the same market. So, they begin to struggle and to look for faster horses even as masters. And it seems as though Henry Ford predicted this present time; when nothing is equal to the number of people around it – limited resources that made people look for faster horses. Here, we don’t call it faster horse, we call it CONNECTION. That made me grow some soft spots for the philosophical writ that “education was the key until CONNECTION changed the padlock.” Now many young graduates are the ones struggling to open the door with the old keys.

Slaves or master’s class is the fifth. If you’re a slave, you’d worry about getting food; If you’re a master, you’d strive to digest excess food or shedding excess fat. Fear is common here: masters fear becoming slaves; slaves fear remaining slaves. And so everyone is struggling! In the sixth class, i.e, The saint and sinners class; there’s also struggle. The struggles here weigh very large like crepuscular boulders. Intrapersonal struggle that can’t be overlook. Is it the saints? Always confused: they don’t know where to turn: is it left? Where nothing is right. Or right? Where nothing is left for the saints. And the sinners: trying their best to beat an addiction. Addiction always outruns sinners, so, they always wish for some form of faster horses that Christians call grace. To finally prove that struggle continues, we get into the seventh class when we die: either heaven or hell class. In hell, connection is not the faster horse there, what is it I don’t know. All I know is that everyone there wishes for nothing better than horses that’d fly them back to earth – or heaven. And even in heaven’s comfort zones, saints would still wish for a faster horse that’d bring their relatives in hell to eternal bliss! I, you, Ford, we; everyone; still wishes for faster horses! But of different kinds! Literal cars, connection, helping hands, riches, positions, good grades, growing fresh, making heaven, etc, are all faster horses in their own shelves that Ford may mean. Do you wish for one…? Yes, then, Ford and I are right! Only one mistake we often make is that we forget that HAPPINESS IS FREE IN ALL CLASSES. We pay attention too much to the clocks of others, while we have our own, and so, we get depressed! And happy are you if you’d never forget to run the race of life without competition in destiny. The world needs kindness not comparison! If you don’t have faster horses, there’s still happiness in an ordinary horse.