Realities About Life

For close to a month now I have been thinking about life, and my thoughts wandered into a spectrum of how our consent are not sought at any aspect of our lives. See, we are born without our consent, me that I’m at me somewhere, then I get thrown into this chaos as a results of someone’s pleasure, when I’m brought here then, I start growing without giving my body the go ahead. At one point in time, I’m pushed to go to school, learn and become someone better, after going to school and growing a little, I am to work and make a living (and because of specialisation and division of labour, I can focus on one profession at a time, though I may possess other skills). After securing work and being stable for a while, then pressure to get married and give birth to a child who will also go through this exact same rigmarole start showing his big forehead. The saddest aspect of all these, is that one day, a day will start without, I will die without prior warning, as some put it, “all these for a life that can be taken from you at any time without your consent”. It may be funny, but this got me thinking about how fleeting life is. What pushed me to write this piece, is an incident that happened on 24/05/26, at church, a man collapsed at church, this man was sitting in-between a businessman and a retired high court judge, but immediately the issue happened, there was a call for help and two doctors who were at church came to our aid, within some few minutes they revived the man in a calm and expert way, that me a writer, and neither the businessman or retired judge could do (the best I could was get a car and put the man in and take him to the nearest health centre, and this might complicate things). The incident really shook me the whole day, and parts of the movie, The Boondock Saints: II. All Saints Day, came to mind.

In the opening scene of the movie, Rocco, is seen walking on the streets, and saying this: “there’s 2 kinds of people in this world when you boil it all down. You’ve got your talkers and you’ve got your doers. most people are just talkers, all they’ve got is talk. But when all is said and done, it’s the doers who change this world. And when they do that, they change us. And that’s why we never forget them. So which one are you? Do you just talk about it or do you stand up and do something about it? Because believe you me, all the rest of it, is just coffeehouse BS”. As the movie progressed, Connor MacManus and his brother Murphy Macnamus, have the same dream in which they are having a conversation with Rocco, and Roc takes them to the roof of one the high rising buildings in Boston and says to them “men build things. Then we die. It is in our f*** DNA! That’s what we do!” … “and when it all fall down, we build it right back up again. But this time bigger. Better! Look at what we can do. Look at how f*** beautiful we are. You think the men that built all this had it easy? Hard men, doing hard s***! … I am so sick of this self-help, 12-step, leftover hippie generation BS! Now they don’t want you to do anything, right? Just sit there! Don’t drink! Don’t smoke! Don’t drive fast! Kiss my a***! F** it! Do it all. I say! … men do not cry, men do not pout, men jack you in the f*** jaw and say thanks for coming out.”

Rocco, only appeared twice in the movie, and in both times he talked something that really got me, Impact! Impact was the core of his messages in the movie, do we know the name of the men who actually built the Akosombo Dam? Or the men who did the steel works for the Adomi Bridge? Who are the men and women who did the yeoman’s job for the Accra International Airport? Oh, let’s bring it down to our locality, we know the name of the contractor who constructed the road in our area, the man who sponsored the building of the school block, but who are the men who actually did the job? We might not know them by name, obviously most of them are dead, but their works continue to serve generations after generations, after generations. The impact of their work has became some of the foundational rocks of the society, yet we do not fully know them.

This is our calling, to have a positive impact on our society or wherever we find ourselves, the doctors who saved the collapsed man at my church saw it as another day in the office, but the man and his family experienced firsthand the importance of their work, and the impact of saving the man’s life will live with them forever. Making impact is not about doing something extraordinary, sometimes it in a smile we share, a compliment, dutifully going about our work, a prompt response to a situation, being time conscious. We cannot all be Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Wonder woman or any other superhero, flying in with our cape or saving the day with our supernatural ability, but in our small corners we can be the only hero someone will ever know of, if we avail ourselves to serve. Oh, yea! The world would move on without us, a day will start without us one day, but, like workers who did the actual works of building the Akosombo Dam, Adomi Bridge, Accra International Airport, the schools we attended, the good we do, will stay in this world and impact people for thousands of years, so let us rise up and be doers and not talkers, because it is through doing something good that we can change the face of world. Remember this, “the architect passes, but his building remains.”

Koffi Adu Flair Demigod
@ 06/06/2026.

   Comments0