RE-THINKING ALOUD: YOLO? Not so fast!

As an opener, let me tell you that ‘you live only once’. Get it right now, ‘you only have one life to live and once it is gone none will give you a second chance’. This statement is scarier than comforting. Yet it is a reminder that we should be the best we can in the singular life we are blessed with.

Consequently to a fate of a singular life one should regard ‘a life time’ as both strategic and adventurous. We are given life in order to be us and through being us accomplish a lot.

Otherwise life seems meaningless and full of nuisances. We are born for a reason and when we die it is yet for another good reason.

A generation comes and a generation goes but the earth remains forever (Ecclesiastes 1:4).

With the fact that generations crossways but the earth holds on – and that, supposedly, forever – we come to guess why we live.

Perhaps we are flowers decorating this immense earth or that we are made to help the earth be what it is! If it turns out to be the latter, it means we are the agency meant to grace this earth through meeting and parting of ways. Each generation is brought to serve successive purposes.

When a generation missteps

Like a sprint wherein there is passing of baton so is life of generations. One generation carries out its accomplishment that it bequeaths to the next and then the previous passes away.

This monotone is an order of life. Mankind is no exception. If a generation reneges this tune of nature it becomes a laughing stock of history.

No one ever outlived history in purpose and implications. We are historical! We are sons and daughters of history.

Whether one wants it or not he soon becomes a stock of history – either obliviously or remarkably. Eventually everyone has better judges in times people come to tell history. Great man, beware, find that history books may become your imprint and narrate your respects.

If you misstep and live an arrogant life either because you have power, wealth, authority or because those you serve are naïve or weakling as to question you it is an unfortunate. It is of no pride to be unquestionable.

It is regrettable. It means you are leading a society that doesn’t fit you. Pray ye that ye shall not be in such temptation. Your family, your neighbours and the society should be able to question you so that you can reflect with them.

What does a man achieve out of his toil under the sun – sweat and harsh labour – if only his time is a fleeting moment? (Ecclesiastes 1:3). Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

It is not until you can translate into goods for the present and the coming generations that your labour is of worthy. Otherwise you ambitious life and struggles are doomed. If your energy, knowledge and age cannot cement into people’s future you are a waste.

Your power corrupts because it is blinding a generation.

Woes unto those who slave for goods of life

Hundreds of thousand Africans are graduating per year. Different from 1980s and early 1990s when college outpours got immediately absorbed in the labour market, many today are jobless and hopeless.

They are neither helpful of themselves nor are assets to societies.

They are generations thrown between a hard rock and thorny bush – read the parable of the Sower (Mathew 13: 1-23).

They are graduating to find life is a closed set. They are left out of what has turned out to be an exclusive set in which those inside barricaded themselves such that ‘they are who they are, we are who we are’.

Little do those inside acknowledge that they can only have one life. They are recklessly tempted to waste the whole ‘other generations’ for their own joyous, gluttonous wasteful life.

They don’t see that once they are gone they leave their people as a laughing stock.

Wilfred Alex is coordinator, editor and tutor at 'Legendary Performers'