What do you want?

Have you thought about what you want? I mean really want. I don’t mean the gorgeous pair of heels you saw in that shop with a ridiculous price tag, or the boots you saw on that dude on the street walking his girl to the bus stop, or that plate of some well fried chicken, a portion of vegetables perfectly crunchy and the roast potatoes that make you salivate when you think about them, no, all that is so small in comparison to what am asking.

What am asking is, have you thought about what you want from your life? This question has plagued me for a while (I will share whatever insights will come my way as I write this piece) and I was hoping to write this as a series of questions but my thoughts command their own expressions. I have wondered for a while now what it is I would want to accomplish for myself in this lifetime. Would I want commendations for it? What would I want commendations for? Maybe I should write my eulogy as I would want it to be read at my funeral not very far from now (this is not a suicide note, just an acknowledgement that am scared of aging to a point of senility or inability to do for myself the basics) and work towards achieving those very things. But something tells me things don’t ever take the route we want them to. So again I ask, have you ever really thought about what you want?

Family is an integral part of who we are, who we were and who we become. Humanity is shaped by the emotional bonds they form in their life spans (if you don’t agree, we can agree to disagree but keep in mind am not saying it’s the only thing, just one of the many). The family you are born into and raised by is the first indicator as to what kind of person you will be. We reflect those around us. My mother with all her good and bad has done what she thought was best for me as a parent. There is no good parenting or bad parenting; there are just the parents best. Whether it meets standards or not, it’s just parenting. I can recall conversations with friends on parenting and with former lovers based on dreams of starting a family together. Those were just talks. I have what I want when it comes to family all mapped out in my brain. It might not be a foolproof plan, it might have some major loopholes but I have learnt parenting is all about loving your child the best you can that they may love others around them just as much in the best way they can. Mothers have been known to defend their children, even the most evil of children. It is their instinct to defend their own blood. Love is the only thing a parent should be most concerned about providing for their child. All others come second. As a child of someone, you should know. I want to raise children who will know love is unconditional. Forgiveness is earned and not through material things. Education is important but not everything, friends are good but they are not blood. Enemies are what you make them and loved ones will always hurt you, hurt and pain are an integral part of love. Love does not end, it alters into its many variations though love does not alter when alteration it finds. Sex has been, is and will continue to be so when I say wait, am not saying it because I don’t want them to ‘enjoy’ themselves, but because I know sex comes with responsibilities and if it’s going nowhere, what are they competing for? Family will always be there for you. Maybe not as a unit, but there will always be that one who no matter how much you fuck up will be there to help you pick up the tiny pieces and piece you back together.

Society is always being charged with one fault or another like we forgot for some time that society is you and me. Don’t even get me started on this, I might be here for far longer than I had anticipated on a tirade of issues that I think we should stop accusing society of judging. It’s general knowledge that man judges that which he does not understand. I don’t want to live in a society that doesn’t understand but is always seeking to be understood. If I talk to everyone I meet about my perfect Utopia and they in turn tell me about theirs, we would find so much in common and a place to agree on. Where we don’t agree, why can’t we just agree to disagree? No one man is entirely right and neither is any one man entirely wrong. I don’t want society to give me any better than what I give, I know so far there is a lot of bad out there I have done, but that does not mean there is no good. A friend once told me karma does not work for her the way it works for the rest of us. She believes she gets good ever. When bad happens it’s just something that happens???(The last bit am not so sure about, the bad rarely if ever seems to happen to her so she says). What is karma for you? Karma for me is not getting as bad as I give in equal measure, it’s that good and bad do exist and I will at some point have bad just as I have had good. Life is not fair to everyone, which is what makes it so fair. Society will not understand me by my sitting on my ass all day writing long emails back and forth to people who already understand me but by me trying to make them understand. There are many ways to skin a rat. I could share a few of my own but I want to be the one to try them out. I want everyone to know that just because they don’t like something, as long as it does not impact them negatively, it is not their place to decide what best works for the common good of man. It will always stand that one mans meat is another’s poison. As much as there is something about me you don’t like, there is something about you I don’t like. If we all went around telling people the things about them we don’t like, we would not be happy. Keep in mind for everyone one person who loves you, there is one who hates you, another who doesn’t know you, another who has heard about you and judged you based on what they heard, and probably another who feels nothing (neither good nor bad) about you. So if you make my living difficult, someone else will make yours impossible.

Economic empowerment of the self. How rich do you want to be? What kind of wealth do you want to have amassed? Man wants immortality so that he can make more money but I read somewhere, Immortality lies not in the things we leave behind but in the people whose lives we have touched. I want to die a wealthy woman. Wealthy in terms of the love I will have, I will not lie and say I have no desire to amass wealth, because I do want to be able to afford the many bouquets of roses I buy myself to make pot pourri, the cans of Monster Energy drink that I love to drink or the many pastries I love to bake (here am thinking my electricity bill and the many utensils I will have to bake with and the dish washer that will have to clean the dishes after am done) or even the many sumptuous dinners I love to indulge in (Mediterrano, Masrawy, Mercury  and Open House cook just for my taste buds) every so often and the many bottles of dear alcohol that is the bane of my existence (Chardonnay, Whiskey and Uganda Waragi e.t.c) and not to forget to mention the millions of airs of shoes I would like to own, not necessarily wear, but to know I own and the clothes and jewellery that I want to shower my beloved with. Am not stingy with myself over my hearts desires. Waswahili walisema, kipendacho moyo ni dawa. Does the end justify the means or the means the end? What do you want for yourself in the next 10 years in terms of economic power? Will you only benefit yourself or the ones around you too? When we make enough to enjoy the finer things in life, we don’t refuse to share, we just get tired of sharing with people who don’t bring the same things to the table as we do. Before you deny it, look around you, all your friends, do you have that one friend who is not doing as well as you financially? How many times in a year do you have something good and fine? Do you call them all those times? If you do, kudos to you and others like yourself. If you don’t, am sure you get that am driving towards the resentment you feel when you keep doing things for people and they don’t give anything back. Its human nature, am not saying it makes you a bad person.

Let me walk away from that, am sure I have given you enough to think over. Now I want to go into the people we want to share the rest of our lives with. Everyone says they want love. Does anyone actually know what kind of love they want? Am of the school of thought that man is vague in all his desires which is why he never gets them fulfilled. He wants wealth but says not what kind, he wants the best of everything but what is everything? Someone once asked me what kind of woman I want and the answer I gave had them in fits for a week but I have thought harder since then and I have gathered that I know in much greater detail now what I want. I cannot assure it will be for forever, but I can assume that it will be. Forever begins with the dawn of every new day. Everyday is the first day of the rest of your life. If I live with someone that I don’t trust, I will be distressed, every waking day will be another reason to fill my mind with doubts. If I live with someone who doesn’t respect me, do I plan on spending the rest of my days with a cloud over my head? If I let myself be surrounded by lies and half truths, will I not be opening myself up to hurt? I want a woman who loves me, respects me, forgives me, doesn’t cheat on me because we have a relationship whose rules of engagement are honesty at all times. I understand that there are times when I will want something other than what I have at home and so will they. Eating rice everyday is a bit boring and there are only so many ways you can cook rice. Sleeping with someone else for me does not mean you love me any less, it just means that there is that one thing you want elsewhere. But doing it and lying about it, now that I wont take. I want a woman who is open to ideas of spicing up our bedroom affairs. Not everyday is a beef day, when do we have chicken? What about vegetables? To be honest, I might never actually sleep with anyone else, but if she wants to, I want to know that she will before she does it. I want to be asked for my consent. Without it what we have is not real. I want a woman who understands that its not that I have anything against her friends, I just don’t want them in our space everyday, like a mole, am content burrowing into our cave away from the world. A woman who will hold me when it rains and gives me that much space when its hot because she knows I cant stand the heat. She understands I love the coast but the smell of humidity heavy with salt makes me sick to the stomach. She doesn’t know everything about me, every day is a learning day. She wants kids, just because we can’t have our own doesn’t mean we can’t have them. We are bound to fight and most times we will have to agree to disagree but that doesn’t mean we are will sleep in different beds…(and I have gone on too long about her). That’s what I want, what do you want???Do you know what you want??? Can you truly say in not so many words or even more if necessary what you really want?

Life has so many dimensions to it. To quote my last post, life is a series and sequence of events, how we deal with them is what is considered living. How do you want to live your life? Do you know? Or do you think you know?