Have we been rushing through life?

“I don’t know mahn.” Larry says as he takes a huge gulp of the cold Delmonte in his hands. For a second, I wonder if it is the question I’ve just asked that he doesn’t know the answer to, or he is unsure if he should not get something stronger than a Delmonte for the hot Saturday afternoon, despite him being a staunch Adventist. I sip my whitecap and watch him lust after my bottle.

“I think we rushed it,” I answer my own question. It did not feel like a rush 10 months ago. The very last academic papers were done and dusted. And four years of confinement within campus walls had convinced us that we were more than ready to face up to the realities of the real world.

To some extent we were right. University had nothing more to offer us. No more long dreary classes from lecturers as boring as TikTok influencers. No more stupid assignments that we would lift off Google anyway. No more exams that forced us to condense semester-long coursework into a single night of study. We had seen it all, done it all. And we were done.

The long nights of debauchery were no longer as thrilling as they used to be. The keg joints were not as fun, the keg itself did not taste the same. Those pretty campus girls in skimpy dresses and fine legs were no longer as enthralling.

And when we shouted “Comrades tibim! Comrades tialala”, while demonstrating for anything and everything, the vigour was not there anymore. We could not feel the everlasting spirit of the comradeship. The camaraderie of the most sacred brotherhood under the stars was dead inside us. We were old. We were not comrades anymore. And we wanted out. 

So we rushed to get out there. No proper goodbyes. No sentimentalities. We just cleared our exams and left. And we headed straight for the big city to start doing life. Maybe we should have waited a little longer. Maybe we should have lounged on our mothers’ couches for a few more months as we figure out how to do this thing called life step by step.

But after being in college for four years studying for something I did not give a pig’s tail about, I was finally free. Free to follow my passion. Free to write my heart into a bicycle and ride on it into the sunset. I could not wait. I did not want to wait. After all, Jordan Peterson says life is a race and the most successful people in the world are successful because they got there first. I knew my track, and I was ready to ride.

Well, there is a lot we did not foresee. The bicycle ride has been bumpy, and the sunset is but a flicker in the further distance. There have been times when my muse forsakes me and the words that I love so much hide their faces from me. When I open a page to write and no word comes. In such moments I feel dejected, forlorn, and alone.

But that is nothing compared to the imposter syndrome that creeps in. What if I just suck at this, and all this while, I have only been running around fooling everybody? What if I’ve run out of my creative juices, what do I do now? This is the only thing I have ever been decent at. If I can’t do it, what can I do?

Perhaps the biggest blow came when I lost my first job, which also means it was the first time I was losing a job. The identity crisis that followed was crazy. I mean I had been this person doing this thing at this place. That was my identity. Now, who was I when I was no longer that person working at that place? No one ever prepared us for such things. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Think about it, such a topic would have fitted perfectly in the philosophy common unit done by every first year in a Kenyan University. Instead of learning how every ancient Greek male thought himself the smartest thing in the galaxy, we would have been taught what to do when you don’t know what to do. Outside the campus walls is mayhem of confusion. The race is no longer for the swift nor knowledge for the wise because the streets play a different game completely. One that was not taught in school.

Do I have regrets? If you’d asked me this a month ago, I would have said no ‘cause a month ago I would be trying to convince myself that I am a goon who doesn’t care about anything. But I do care about stuff. And I have regrets.

I do not regret the path that I chose, but how I rushed to follow that path. And how much I’ve been rushing throughout the two decades I’ve been alive. Sometimes I wonder if this is a Twenties thing. The rush. The need to do it all and get it right as fast as possible. Or maybe it is just my thing. Either way, I’m learning to take it one step at a time.

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