Prose

THE SEARCH FOE HAPPINESS

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There is a pursuit on which we all are, a selfish or simply a personal pursuit; the pursuit of happiness. Everybody who connects with you does so in the course of their own pursuit of happiness. Once they become convinced that they cannot find happiness with you or through you, they will leave you. Don’t take it personal. Because you are also on a similar journey in your own life and in your own path.

Everything you do, everything you hope for, everybody you relate with, it is – finally – with the desire and with the expectation that you will find happiness there. Happiness is our paradise, it is our goal, it is what we all seek. The balance is to be able to find happiness without negatively impacting your physical or ethereal environment, and without unfairly and unjustly diminishing another person’s happiness as the price of yours.

But, somehow, you will still sometimes make others unhappy just to make yourself happy. It is unavoidable. And Vice versa. Because we are imperfect maturing developing beings. When they leave you, leave them too and move on, in the pursuit of your own happiness. If you seek, one day you shall find. In this life or in another, if you continue to seek happiness with a good heart and a pure mind, one day you shall happiness truly and deeply find.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains

A LITTLE HAPPY EVERYDAY

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Sometimes you love someone, but the person loves someone else. Or the person simply prefers a lifestyle different from the one which a life with you would have to offer them. So they choose or go after someone else who, or another path that, can offer them that lifestyle.

Being that the aim, the very aim, of life itself is Happiness, this experience of rejection cuts to the very heart of the essence of existence. The hurt can kill the soul. It makes people reappraise themselves, question their worth and even find fault in their own fundamental character. Yet, while self-examination is healthy, so also are self-love, self-understanding and self-acceptance equally necessary.

When trapped in a spiral of self-abnegation in which one no longer recognises oneself, It then becomes imperative to awaken, within one’s consciousness, a new narrative of life and of self in order to find the path to a new source of joy, as a new person. To outgrow the self-image that traps one in a cycle of pain, perhaps even to shed certain traits, and to learn to see oneself, one’s path and one’s Why with fresh new eyes. To find a new understanding of the purpose of life.

This is where the concept of never giving up comes into play. Every morning when you wake up, strive for joy. Be prepared to let go of those thoughts and those beliefs that weigh you down debilitatingly. Be ready and able every day to try a new path, a new thought, until you find the exit – and then you can take flight again.

Life is a jigsaw puzzle. Many parts fit, but many parts don’t fit also. And you have to move the pieces about in your heart and in your life continuously, often, and courageously in order to slowly put your answers together.

And, as you stride on along this way, try… try to be a little happy every day. In the end, that’s all you have. That’s all we have to share with one another. That is our humanity.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains

UNDULATING PLAINS

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“Undulating Plains” is the section where I sprawl my thoughts and intuitions out as prose. I wander and I wonder, through my mind and heart, across the length and breath of my inner life, dredging the depths and crowning the heights, as I stride ever forward in the long arch of my continuous existence, spanning many incarnations, like a sojourner travelling seekingly over these undulating plains and varied landscape of the many planes of existence in this wonderful Creation of God.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains

INDEPENDENCE

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My good nature, my balanced constitution, cannot be dependent on the presence of a person in my life, or on the love I receive from anybody, or on my good health, or on wealth or status or power.

It has to derive from my relationship with GOD, the Unchanging One, the Almighty One, the Eternal, the Omnipresent Omnipotent Omniscient ONE. The Author and the Finisher. Love and Life Itself.

My happiness cannot be dependent on anything or anyone outside of me, apart from GOD, and that thing within me – deep in my heart – that relates with GOD.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains

DON’T SURRENDER IT ALL TO AI

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The primary aim of artistic expression is inner clarification of self, as well as personal spiritual development. The secondary aim is communication and sharing of ideas, which in any case always happens automatically as a by-product.

If you outsource all your artistic creativity to Artificial Intelligence, then, yes, finished works of a certain mould will be generated, but your spirit will not grow. And the purpose of your earthlife – the very purpose of life itself – will not be fulfilled. This lies alone in the continuous development of your “I” through self-exertion, self-clarification and the constant effort towards pure and accurate self-expression of intuition via thought into word and deed.

AI will produce works that resemble beauty, but will lead to the atrophy and death of the human spirit – unless you critically interrogate those works and then correct, reject or surmount them with your own personal effort, your own intuiting and reasoning. Don’t surrender to AI. Learn it but remain above it. Artificial Intelligence will make you look good, make you feel good, but only you can become better by yourself, by your own effort. The ancient rule is still the same, there is no short cut to success.

It is very imperative, in this era of artificial intelligence, for each person to remain personally creative, as well as spiritually and intellectually active and independent. Make the effort to think your own thoughts through to the end, and formulate and write them down by yourself. Compose, rehearse and record your own music. Make your own art. Draw the inspiration not just from others, but also, like before, from within the fathomless depths of your immortal spirit. Spend time in the silence of your heart, listening to your inner voice, hearing yourself by yourself and not from the programmed algorithm of an AI companion’s voice.

And also continue to do as many things with your hands as possible. Build. Make. Write. Go out into the world. Use your physical muscles, use your brain muscles, use your heart muscles, use your soul and use your spirit. And also, PATRONISE THOSE WHO DO SO, THOSE WHO STILL PRODUCE BY THE EFFORT OF HUMAN CREATIVITY. When you do this, you are not doing them a favour, but you are doing yourself and humanity and our future a SERVICE!

This is the only way they will grow. This is the only way we will grow. This is how we survived as a species over millions of years. This is how we got here. By the agency of Natural personal Human Intelligence. WE have always been the ones evolving, the ones plumbing our own depths, the ones developing. Thus: Woe betide us today if we now, tempted by convenience, hand that task now over to a self-programming and self-learning artificial algorithm we fashioned. Like the Zauberlehrling who can no longer deactivate or control the witchcraft he awakened. We would thereby have marked the beginning of the end of the story of the human spirit on Earth.

We are the generation that must tame the beast we have created, and ensure that it remains a servant and never becomes the cold lifeless master of our destiny, literally and figuratively. AI is wonderful for sourcing and collating information, and sorting and delivering it coherently. It is also marvellous at generating alternative versions of expressive output. But it cannot see the light. It cannot produce that individual unique recognition that can only come from deep within you. And it cannot produce the NEW, a truly new and different future. It can only regurgitate and re-permutate the past.

The production of Newness is still the purview and the task of the living and active human spirit. Let AI not be our last invention. Let us continue to bestir ourselves to intuit, imagine, innovate and invent even greater creations in the future, greater and higher than AI, and which also come from us – or through us. For WE are human spirit.

Retain your primary art-form in your hands. Don’t outsource it in the name of comfort, or vanity, or convenience, or competition, or materialism. Save and continue to develop that which is most valuable to us – our spirit. Let art, intuition and inspired thinking continue to be tools for personal inner growth through the joy of effort.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

TIME DOES NOT CHANGE THINGS

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Time doesn’t change things, they stay as they are. Events change things. Experiences change things. Things change things. Not time. Time only changes the outer appearance of the form of things.

Sometimes a thing that seems like it will last forever only lasts a short time and then changes, because the thing or event that will change it met it early.
While sometimes an other thing that seems flimsy and ephemeral stays unchanged for eternities, because the thing or experience that will change it has not yet met it.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

NIGERIA: STILL STRUGGLING FOR INDEPENDENCE

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Nigeria

Which will be the first modern, post-colonial Black African country to become independent?
– To stand as a First World country in the midst of global leaders.
– To take the leap from extractive economy to highly productive, manufacturing, innovative and invention-leading economy.
– To develop and run a nation-wide, all-encompassing and unconditional Social Security scheme.
– To become an Export world champion, exporting not just natural resources, but finished products.
– To take its place at the cutting edge of technology and information technology.
– To become a favoured global destination for medical tourism and university education.
– To have a currency that rivals USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CNR.
– To develop and take a leading role in the building of a new economy and new industry around the concept of sustainability. Because that is the future.
– To entrench legally protected civil and human rights.
– To engender independent institutions of democracy.
– To defeat the evil of tribalism.
– To stop begging, taking and being dependent on foreign aid.
– To stop allowing foreign religions to drive it to hate, exploit, oppress or kill its fellow Africans.
– To stop producing economic Refugees in droves.
– To hold regular free and fair elections, free of rigging, where votes count.
– To hold its richest and most powerful accountable.
– To fight corruption impartially, and stand without exemptions under the Law.
– To eradicate extreme poverty, and democratise and ensure education and opportunity for all.
– To work tirelessly for peace and unity on the African continent.
– To push, power and perfect intra-African trade, tourism and transport to the same levels as on other continents and in other world regions.
– To have a modern, disciplined military focused on defense of borders and values, as well as upholding of peace, and not full of megalomaniac dreams of coup d‘etats and executive power all the time.
– To have a depoliticised Police Force that serves the people rather than being used against the people.
– To maintain a hardworking, well-functioning, digitalised, detribalised, highly educated Civil Service.
– To own its own narrative, with its own independent media, on the global stage.
– To become a global lender, instead of a global borrower and beggar.
– To export technology and new technology to the rest of the world.
– To have a power, economic and civil infrastructure that matches every other First World country‘s.
– To become one of the decision makers in the UN, in WEF, in the G8.
– To break the culture of waste, squander and exhibitionism.
– To support and grow small and medium-scale enterprises all over the country.
– To develop a large and economically virile middle class.
– To feed itself independently.
– To power itself independently.
– To ensure electricity 24/7.
– To become a center of future-birthing research and development.
– To become a part of the space community.
– To find its own local solutions to its own local, as well as global, challenges.
– To be a part owner, and controller, of the global market.
– To produce proud citizens who have greater opportunities in their own Black countries than they would in foreign countries where they are never fully accepted.
– To turn around the historical burden of slavery and colonisation, and transform it into global leadership.
– To stand as a First World country in the midst of global leaders.

Which will be the first Black African country to become REALLY INDEPENDENT?

This is the silent question that hangs unanswered in the global imagination of all humankind, and floats inchoate through the heart of everybody of Black African extraction anytime another Black African country celebrates its annual so-called Independence Day.

Today’s it’s Nigeria’s turn. Country of my birth. 1st October.
Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.
Or should I rather say:
Happy Future-Independence Day.

Because only Self-dependence, Self-reliance, is truly Independence.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije

USING SELF-CONFIDENCE

~ Che ~ 2 Comments

The most powerful thing you can give people is confidence. Self-confidence. But some people, once they have it they turn around and use it against you, who awakened it in them.

Next time, you feel like leaving people wallowing in their pitiful inferiority complex.

But a part of you still goes ahead and keeps on strengthening people who need it everywhere you meet them. What they later do with this strength and self-confidence is their business.

You have done yours.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

REFLECT BEFORE CELEBRATE

~ Che ~ 5 Comments

Why was I born? Why were you born?
Into this Earth.

My birthday always makes me think. This year more than ever, I don‘t know why. The questioning thought: Everything I‘ve done in the last 48yrs, have they in any way really fulfilled the reason WHY I WAS BORN? Or have I up until now, in a deep subtle way, just been wasting my time? For I was not born in order to celebrate that birth annually. Viewed logically, that‘s a senseless feedback loop – unless augmented, nay, superseded, by a PURPOSE – and the fulfilment of that purpose – of my birth into this earth.

49 years ago, I was not here. I was not a part of this daily hustle and bustle, getting into cars and busses, voting in elections, raising kids, being earthy and doing the earthly. So, where was I? And why did I come here? Where were you before you were born? And why did you come here?

Every year the certainty that I‘m closer to my earthly death, to my departure. I just feel it, so strongly. That reduced distance. It‘s not just a piece of general knowledge that we all have: Everybody dies one day. Yes we all know this. But it is more than this. It‘s also a solid emotional perception, a physical presence that comes closer, that you can feel when you close your eyes and pay attention.

My birthday makes me think, not just of birth, but also of death.

My brother, Kwame, aged 19, died on my 21st birthday. It was a few weeks before his own 20th birthday. The person closest to me. Why did he come? Did he or did he not fulfil the purpose of it? And then he was gone again. It‘s a date we share, in life and death.

Life existed before we were born into it. It was perfect, already. Before we were created, Creation was already formed and perfect. This realisation makes me think and there is no end to this reflection. Just a clear line of perception – an intuitive perception:

You are not without a reason and not without a purpose, unless you fail – consciously or unconsciously – to discover that reason and that purpose; and then to – deliberately or instinctively – fulfil that reason and that purpose.

It‘s a serious and thought-provoking business meeting your birthday again, and still not knowing why. Or knowing if you’re fulfilling why, as best as you can. Year after year.

I don‘t need to celebrate my birthday. I need to reflect upon it.

Reflect before celebrate.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
06. April 2022

Little Che – mid 1970s.

SURVIVAL SHOULD NEVER BE RACIALISED

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Every global problem comes with special extra dimensions of evil for Black people.

Blacks being prevented from escaping war in Ukraine. Thrown out of busses and trains. Refused entry at the Ukraine-Poland border. Many of them students. Some of them women with children.

BUT everybody wants easy access to the minerals under African soil.

War brings out the Ugliness – and the Truth – in humanity.

I feel pain. Because you want to help others. But does anybody want to help you?

You want to show solidarity with others. But no one wants to show solidarity with you.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

https://fb.watch/bqUuf3FIFf/