wednesday's child is full of woe

The protagonist in my story is a restless soul. It's high velocity and excitable, but not in a way that might be placated by proximity to danger or the thrill of an uncertain adventure. Mine has the restlessness of a displaced body seeking home, but rarely finding more than temporary accommodation in precarious settlements.

existential angst

I’m not exactly sure how the brain decides what information from the past is worth storing as memory, but hazarding a guess, the experiences that leave the greatest emotional imprint at the time are most likely to linger on. I have a few such etched memories from my earliest years.

One of them is a lucid dream I have as a baby, floating in the sky with a birds eye view of the world below me. I traverse far distances, overlooking trees and houses below, slowly descending through the ceiling of my aunt’s house in Accra, hovering above my cot, before finally jolting awake in my body. Bizarre, but real in a delicate way that is difficult to describe.

Recently, I remembered another. I’m maybe 5 years old, standing in the narrow hallway of our flat in Peckham. I remember the red carpet which doubled as a sea of volcanic lava us kids creatively avoided in our childhood-games. I remember the buzz of activity and reverberation of voices: siblings, parents, cousins from back home, bouncing gently off the walls. But what I remember most in that moment is an uninvited pause that captured my attention; a chill creep slowly up my back and my eyes widening with a sudden realisation.

I am alive.

I will continue to be alive until I die, and religious upbringing in mind, perhaps beyond. It wasn't the idea of death that I found arresting, it was the inability to press pause. A surging overwhelm envelopes me.

25 years later...

It's my son's traditional naming ceremony. Two friends of mine meet for the first time in a similarly narrow hallway in another South London flat. One is a friend from University, the other I’ve known since we were both 11 years old navigating the social quagmire of secondary school.

“So what were you into after you lost interest in football?”

Thinking for a moment, I land on music. Before I could go into a nostalgic recount of catching the bus to the studio after school, or writing lyrics to grime beats downloaded off Limewire, my older friend interjects.

“Yeah, but besides that, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve just always been deep into some existential...”

He pauses.

“I wouldn’t say like a crisis…”.

He pauses again.

”… but yeah, just asking mad existential questions that I wouldn’t really think about”.

Now I pause.

I can’t lie, he kind of spun me with that. But on reflection, he’s not wrong.

seeking

In many ways I’m the same person at six years old as I am today - searching for something that can speak to my existential angst. Provide light to those big questions. Why are we here? What makes for a life well lived?

I wonder whether six-year old me would have found some comfort in there not being a shortfall of “answers” out there. Maybe even excited by the challenge of uncovering them? Or with hindsight, would he have been horrified by how deeply inundated we are with information consistently vying for our attention - politicians, spiritual gurus, academics, creatives and technologists, all seemingly confident in their visions of the world, all making their case in the marketplace of ideas.

Well how does 30 year old me fair?

In 2023, with the vast expanses of the internet at our fingertips, access to knowledge isn’t the problem, making sense of it is. I’ve dipped cupped hands in pools of information, supposed truth seeping trough my fingers, failing to contain much of any at one time.

There have been countless times that I've sat at a desk, or laid in bed with a head full of thoughts, clouded by fog. I've also experienced fleeting moments of almost intoxicating clarity, spurred by something I read, or saw, or gifted to me in quiet moments of meditation.

But that’s where many of us perhaps go wrong. Confusing the retention of facts and theories as knowledge, and grasping at them as end goals. Truth, for the purpose of navigating life, isn’t simply to be contained in your hands, it is to be embodied. Drank. Processed. Integrated in your living cells. A shift. A transformation made home in your very being and expressed in your daily interactions with the world.

So to what end am I writing out loud, adding my voice into the endless ether? For me, expression is the greatest form of processing - the closest I feel to doing the work described above. Frankly, for my own sanity, it’s become obligatory to make writing a habitual practice. Sharing the fruits of these sessions in this tiny corner of the internet is my way of archiving the transformation I hope it facilitates in me. To appease the restless soul of that six-year old.

I’ll sign off with a thought. What does it mean when your daily state feels like approaching a sea of uncertainty? You hold a glimmer of a vision in your mind and feel the forward motion of time with an urgency that demands action. Perhaps this is progress? Brazenly facing the chaos of life head on and finding order from the apparent mess. Hopefully it means becoming alive to the potentialities surrounding your existence and choosing the most beautiful version, or at the very least deciding to move.