By Nkiru Ogbuli
Ask me my motto in life and I would tell you simply, “Do unto others what you would want them to do unto you.” This is my guiding principle. For Christians, you will find it in Matthew 7: 12. I am guessing there is a similar verse in the Quran (I’ll ask my Muslim friends).
When I see how some people go about life, treating others so shabbily, going about it with so much braggadocio, I just wonder if they don’t have the same consciousness as I have that each day might actually be our last on earth.
It is not fear but when you look around and see how people who are healthy today and tomorrow are no more, you surely would want to live right in the best way you can and leave this world without anything on your conscience, don’t you? Afterlife aside, since many people might not believe that Heaven or Hell exist.
People consciously make it a duty to behave in a manner that causes great grief to others, leaving damaged persons in their wake. They themselves, damaged apparently and so, it becomes a never ending circle.
I’ll give you an example that for the longest time I found hard to believe that human beings could go that far, call me a learner. Say a guy meets a lady with whom he has no interest in being serious with, instead of telling her what he wants, for her to decide if she is game, he goes about it treating her in the most gentlemanly manner. It is a plot that might take years to execute. After a while, she succumbs because who wouldn’t want to be treated nicely? She falls deeply in love with him, then the guy goes ghost! Pray, tell, what do you want to become of such lady? Who behaves in this manner if not a damaged person?
A lady might embark on a mission to ‘eat’ a guy’s money, knowing she has no interest whatsoever in him. She eats for years upon years and wakes up one morning to say she has found someone she actually wants to marry. How do people do that seriously? We know how the story goes most times, not in anyway endorsing that though.
It happens in business when people get you to trust them totally and you wake up one morning to find out that they have absconded with your hard earned money. Each time I hear such stories, I wonder how such people sleep at night knowing that someone somewhere is in agony because of them. So many examples abound.
No human can be said to be perfect but we can at least try. You don’t have to go out of your way to treat people better but you can at least try not to leave them worse than you met them. We can each strive to be the healing the world needs in our little corners, one person at a time.
Have a great week ahead.