I have been thinking a lot lately…

I have been thinking a lot lately…

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A lot of things have happened in recent times, some even inexplicable. And each time I could only utter one statement: This lottery called life. Is life really a game of chance for which only the luckiest make it? I think so. I'm not sure, so maybe you'll help me answer that.

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First, think of how you were born. How did you get born into the family you were born? Many times I wonder how those almajiris picked parents that would farm them out to clerics, to sometimes be used to meet destructive desires. But they didn't even pick their parents. Consider also a parent knowing nothing about the baby until birth when they begin to foist molecules of their identities on the baby. Is it a lottery? If you're lucky you get rich parents? And if you're not… at least you got to tell everyone money can't buy happiness.

And I smile.

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Sometimes I hear people saying they are grateful for the family they have and that they could not have been in a better one. They are proud of their family, but I wonder if they will feel differently if they were born into a different family. Will DJ Cuppy Otedola not still be proud of her family if she was my neighbour whose car only starts on special days and then will take some days to rest before it agrees to work again? Even now I wonder whether I'll be asking this question if I was born with a silver spoon: Is life a lottery?

One day I took a picture of flowers. Here's one.

In the last couple of months or thereabouts, I have learnt more about Sickle Cell than I've known all my life before this year, and one of the things I learnt is that apart from the resources it drains, sickle cell carriers suffer crisis even when they adhere strictly to their routine drugs, eat balanced diet, stay away from strenuous activities and refrain from exposing themselves to cold. And the pain? Oh my God! It's unimaginable. I can’t describe it, because even people who experience it can't find words to describe the pain. Now tell me, why should anyone go through pain like this for no fault of their own when there's a possibility of living a pain-free life at birth? Are problems given based on random selection? Is life a lottery?

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I'm still not sure what I think, but I feel that at birth an invisible machinery selects who gets to live and who gets to dream. And there's another machinery through life that gets to reward some of the dreamers who run to the finish line, and knock the others for even daring to run. Like now, there's a hardworking woman who has only managed to buy half a loaf of bread for her three children, there's another hardworking woman whose maid is cooking a three-course meal for. There's me who must raise a very large sum of money, and even if I do, I'm still not certain what life I'd be living, and there's someone, equally hardworking, who'll go on vacation to France in the morning tomorrow. We didn't choose our lives for real, so is life a lottery?