‘How do this people do it? ‘ asked a funny friend of mine whom we can surely say was not from this part of the world. I had a perfect and wise answer that i had in mind that would have been sufficient until it hit me that it was also a question of mine….How do these white ordinary looking people take for granted the warming of the weather for six months of the year and the cooling of it to a certain ‘concrete’ ice for another six ??
Or for that matter how is it that life is lived here in the European north without much of the hocus pocus religiosity that bedevils the people from where i hail from far more prosperous and fruitful while nothing but misery for the majority is what the Gods subscribed us to?? How do they measure happiness or perhaps contentment and what metrics do they put to it to show ..what is it exactly to them?
To what do they ascribe the afterlife to?? Is there such a thing?? Have they given up on the divine that such a thing they no longer believe in and thus been freed from all that is ‘Above’ and ‘is creater of them all’??
These questions have dogged my life for the past decade in this part of the world that i have done nothing else but lived watching others live their lives all the while asking myself what it is that differentiates them from us. The term perspective is an interesting one as it makes for a never ending comparative assessment but i suppose you can’t help it when you as an adult has seen the same life lived in two continents but with two different ways of organizational characters, two ways of logistical arrangements and two different societal backgrounds. These two places are the Horn of Africa and Northern Europe. I would like to illuminate this with a couple more of essays and i will publish them as soon as i get to them.