Chaotic

Being the perfectionist that I am, I like order, predictability and clarity. Anything to the contrary is inexplicably irritating. Though life doesn’t always allow these three to coexist, I always work to keep them all in my life, to whatever degrees possible. This is why I can only find one word to describe my life at a certain point in time, not very far back: chaotic.

I will never forget the last few months of the year 2008 and the first couple of months of 2009. Every effort I put into getting some order back into my life ran me into a brick wall. I discovered that no order can be found when you’re living in a country at the peak of hyperinflation, economic meltdown and societal dysfunction; Zimbabwe is the country.

The disturbing experiences I endured left permanent mental scars, that I study and learn from, up to this day (June 2016). They even inspired me to write one of the earlier works in my career, Defunct Money, a short memoir I wrote and published in 2012.

Can you imagine living in a country where money doesn’t work and you have absolutely no hope of making something of your life through normal hard work and focus? Can you wake up every morning and not know what you will eat and if you will be alive tomorrow? Would you have a reason to live if you knew that all you’ve been working to achieve in your life was most likely going to end as just a dream? With no work possible to do, lack of the basic needs of life such as healthcare, food security, reliable water and electricity supply, and no ray of hope in the near future, would you have something to look forward to? With so many important things missing from your life, would you have time to think about dreams and hopes for the future?

Of all of my life’s lows, I consider these experiences to be the worst of the worst; I had hit rock bottom, and proceeded to fall further—into a very deep crack in the rock, and hit the bottom of that as well.

I embrace all these memories now, because I realize that the experiences helped shape my character and opened my eyes to another side of life that I never knew existed. Many lessons can be drawn from what I experienced and I’ll share some important ones.

Among the most salient lessons I learned from that chaotic period of my life, the ability to better appreciate the value of order in life comes first. When things are going well and life’s events and circumstances fit into each other frictionlessly like a well-oiled machine, it is easy to get so used to the seemingly perfect and unbreakable harmony that we become lax and unappreciative of the underlying principles that hold an orderly life together. Nowadays, I am unable to ignore the enablers of order in my life, because I’ve seen how things can get out of hand easily. Work, foresight, proactivity, keeping in touch with reality and questioning things in life; these are the enablers of an orderly life.

Work is more important to me than ever before and I appreciate not just the rewards of it, but even the opportunity to work; the opportunity that I yearned for and lacked for almost four years. Work is sweet to a productive soul once deprived by circumstance.

Our current circumstances say a lot about what happened in the past and what might happen in the future. Foresight is an important enabler of order dependant on our awareness of the overall direction of life. With it, decisions are made today to create a desired tomorrow. Such decision-making is the beginning of proactivity and any actions we take will allow us to be ahead of circumstance, acting ahead of time.

At all times, I make sure that I am in touch with reality; especially when things are “well” and life is on a high. I’ve learned that the comforts of life can easily seduce you to idleness and procrastination, if no deliberate efforts to be productive are made. Questions also possess much power, as I wrote in this book’s predecessor Questions Asked (Mere Reflections, Book 4), and if you question the things in your life, you initiate thought processes that lead to answers with solutions, guidance, wisdom and change.

All these enablers work together to maintain the principles that uphold an orderly life. Disturbances in my life’s order brought about these lessons and forever engraved them in my mind.