By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu – PhD
The places we strain hardest to reach are the places we could least bear to live in. We want success with nothing left to prove and peace with nothing left to disturb it, and we have never stopped to ask what a person would do on the morning after arriving at either.
The complaint of a patient man
Those who know him say he is slow to anger, which is why the outburst was remembered. An elderly man, after what he described as a long season of watching and holding his tongue, announced that he was calling humanity to order. He had no quarrel with our effort. If anything, he thought we were trying too hard at the wrong thing. His complaint was that we have misjudged the pace of our own growing, that we pour into life more force than it asks for and in the wrong direction, and that this single misjudgment, which hardly anyone notices, is what stands between us and any lasting peace.
The root of it, he said, is a habit of the eye. We have learned to look at the world and see only its two ends. A man is a success or a failure. A country is rising or sinking. A neighbour is kind or unkind, a home happy or unhappy, a heart at peace or in pieces. Listen to any gathering in December, when sons and daughters return to the village, and you will hear the sorting done within minutes of each arrival: this one has made it, that one has not. Nobody asks how far either has come from where they began, or what the journey took out of them. The verdict is all that is wanted, and it comes in two sizes only.
A world with two settings
The old man had a word for this, borrowed from the machines. He called it zerosoneness, the belief that everything can be answered with a nought or a one. It appeals to us because it saves labour. To say that a child is “not serious” takes a second; to find out that she reads well, fears arithmetic and has improved steadily since her mother fell ill takes an afternoon. A verdict travels easily from mouth to mouth. An honest account of a person does not.
But what begins as a shortcut for the tongue ends as a rule for living. Consider the final-year student who misses a first-class degree by a hair’s breadth after four years of superb work, and walks out of the hall feeling like a failure. Consider the trader whose shop fed five children and sent them all to school, who still counts himself a small man because he never became a big one.
Consider the couple who conclude, after one bitter month, that their marriage must be unhappy, since it is plainly no longer the happy one of the photographs. In each case something large and real has been achieved, and in each case the two-setting mind can find no place to record it. What it cannot record it does not reward, and so our prizes, our promotions, our praise and our blame all wait at the finishing line and ignore the road.
Here the old man’s point about pace comes into view. A switch has no speed. It cannot be half pressed. Whoever believes that life offers only two conditions must believe that the passage from one to the other is a leap, and people who feel bound to leap do one of two things. Some hurl themselves at it year after year until health, family and conscience are spent on the attempt. Others measure the gap, judge it beyond them, and sit down. We call the first group driven and the second lazy, and miss that both took the same false reading from the same faulty instrument.
Too hot, too cold
The most arresting thing the old man said was that the poles are no place for the living. They are too hot or too cold, and a sane person would not wish to stay at either. The body already knows this. It keeps itself within a degree or so of thirty-seven Celsius, and a few degrees in either direction puts a life in danger. Every cook knows it too. Turn the flame too high and the soup burns before it is done; turn it too low and it never cooks. The meal is made in between, by someone who keeps a hand near the fire and adjusts it.
Then think of what the far ends would hold if a person could reach them. A success so complete that nothing remains to be tried. A happiness so full that there is nothing left to hope for. A peace so perfect that nothing stirs in it, which is how we usually describe a graveyard. We have all met some version of the man who retired at the height of his career with every ambition fulfilled, and who within a year was restless, diminished, and asking for something, anything, to do.
He had arrived, and discovered that arrival has no tomorrow in it. The opposite pole is no kinder. Total failure and total despair also remove the reason to get out of bed, only more cruelly. This was the old man’s meaning when he said that life at the extremes would be bereft of incentive. Where there is no further step to take, the legs lose their purpose.
None of this makes the poles worthless. A traveller needs north in order to know which way he is facing, though he has no intention of building a house on it. In the same way we need our notions of excellence, of goodness and of peace, as bearings to walk by. Our mistake has been to treat a bearing as an address, and then to grieve over every day spent living somewhere else.
Where the music is
Against all this the old man set a single phrase. Reality, he said, is found outside the extremes, and the proper name for a sane life is living in the spectrum. The truth about any of us lies somewhere along the range. No one is simply kind. We are kinder in the morning than at the end of a hard day, kinder to our own children than to the stranger at the gate, and kinder this year, with luck, than last. No one is simply at peace. We carry more of it in some seasons and less in others, and we generally know which season we are in.
The talking drum makes the point better than argument can. Pull its cords as tight as they will go and the skin is strained to tearing. Leave them slack and the drum gives only a dull thud. Neither extreme makes music. The drummer speaks by squeezing and easing the cords under his arm, moving the pitch up and down between the two limits, and everything the drum has ever said, it has said from somewhere in the middle.
To live this way is to ask different questions. In place of “have I made it?” one asks where one stands today, which way one is moving, and how fast one can go without breaking. Standing somewhere on a range carries no disgrace; it is simply a location, as a village is. Direction begins to matter more than rank, since the woman of modest means who is steadily climbing is in a better condition than the grandee who is quietly slipping. And pace, the old man’s first concern, at last becomes something we can see and set. A flame can be turned up a little, or down. A life can be pushed at the speed a human frame will bear and eased when the road turns rough.
He was firm, too, that the middle is where the enjoyment lies. The real fun of living, he said, and the thing that keeps us striving, is the chance to work our way through the many shades between the extremes, some of which test us, some of which hearten us, and some of which push us on. Give a painter only black and white and he can manage a silhouette. Give him everything in between and he can paint his mother’s face.
Two misreadings should be shut out before they enter. The old man was not excusing the half-hearted. A spectrum still has a better end and a worse one, and it never stops asking which way a person is walking. Nor was he saying that nothing is finally true or good. He was saying that the true and the good are approached by degrees, and that the degrees are where a life is actually spent.
What getting it right means
If he is right, then most of us have been putting the wrong question to our lives. We ask whether we have arrived. Because arrival at a pole is neither possible nor, on reflection, desirable, the honest answer is always no, and the restlessness never lifts. Peace was not waiting at the far end of the scale. It belongs to the person who knows where he stands on it, has chosen his direction, and is moving at a speed he can keep up.
Getting it all right turns out to be a matter of tuning, and tuning is never finished. For one person it may mean judging the year by the ground covered and the direction held. A parent might learn to greet a child’s climb from forty marks to fifty-five with the joy now reserved for ninety. An employer might start to pay attention to the clerk who improves every quarter as well as the star who was brilliant on arrival. A nation might give up the daily shouting match over whether it has succeeded or failed and take up the quieter and more useful inquiry into what has moved, by how much, and toward what.
It was a rare show of temper from a patient man, and it would be a pity to waste it. He did not ask us to want less from life. He asked us to stop staring at the two ends of the gauge, where nobody lives, and to watch the needle, which is where we have been all along.
About the Author
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
