Someone recently asked me. ‘What’s your end game?. Before that question, I had a plan all laid out [or so I thought]. I was going to master my crafts I was going to be disciplined, I was going to listen to my parents and elders, and most of all I was going to live according to God’s commandments. Isn’t this just a perfect plan… How could it go WRONG?
This question was everything that could go wrong, it made me ask myself the question I most dreaded to ask. WHO AM I? In answering this question I would be able to decipher what was my end game. The answer that a son to my mother, a student in my final year in Campus, and a lukewarm Christian did not cut it at all. So I sought to find the answers to this question.
Look at it this way whatever decision you made in your life did you primarily think of it on your own. You like chicken do you think you just decided to like Chicken or did someone affect your judgment on chicken. Were you born rapping or did you come across an individual or something that pushed you to the direction of rapping, why do you talk the way you do, why does everyone tell you that you look like your grandfather[because you do]? One thing about human beings is that we are social creatures and in being social creatures we affect each other. What I’m simply trying to say is that the decision you made today is not your own but someone else’s and so you are not Free. Brings back the question ‘What is ‘my’ end game?’
I initially told you my plan in life, and all this is because those I look up to use this formula in life. They told me it’s what they were told and used all their life. I don’t object to it at all because in all fairness some of them are successful in however they quantify success to be. One thing about all their lives is that they all had the same problem, they were all judgemental. I say this without any fear of discrimination or malice but they were. They felt that without following this formula we were the black sheep, the weeds, the unwanted, the problem society should root out.
I feel that they were not strong enough to outdo the system and hence they fight whoever thinks they can work the system. We live so much in the identities given to us by other people that we do not allow ourselves to truly live. We have been told so much to look in a certain direction we think it is the only way. In the end, we realize that it was not our game we were playing but someone else’s game. However much I believe that there is a higher being beyond us who has a purpose for each one of us [so we might be pawns in THEIR game] what we can truly choose is to enjoy.
Steven Hopkin in 1990 in the Lady Mitchel Auditorium asked the packed stadium a very simple yet complicated question, ‘Is man determined or is he free?’. After myriad scientific arguments and explanations, he came to a culminating answer that, ‘Yes man is determined, but since we do not know what determined means we may as well not be.’ You can allow that statement to disturb your mind and elicit all the feelings you could get out of it as for me I have allowed it to do so and am not going to do it again. It put me in a space where I felt closed, in me realizing that Yes I might not be free made me go crazy. So whatever I said as my end game was it mine or was I determined. It made everything I ever did quite meaningless to myself.
After a period of soul searching I decide that it was better to live in the illusion that I owned all my thoughts it was more peaceful and satisfying that way. That’s all that mattered that I was at peace with everything else, that nothing was a coincidence and that wherever I was going to enjoy every bit of it. Yes, I might not be free but one thing is sure I chose is to be happy that cannot be decided for me I chose that for myself. That is now my end game, I have decided to be content and happy. I suggest you do that to yourself it is satisfying.
