Don't Die Still Curious.
You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.
Jẹ́ kí ayé ẹ kà ẹ lára.
I keep saying this to myself over and over, like a man trying to remember something he knows he cannot afford to forget.
It translates to “Let your life mean something to you.”
And there is something about saying it in Yoruba that adds urgency and weight. It demands something from you that English politely does not.
Ayé. The word means life, but it also means world. The Yoruba language does not separate the two. Your life and the world are the same noun. Which means what I am saying to myself is not just that I want my life to mean something. It is that I want the world to know I was here. That I occupied this specific window of human history and did not waste it.
And it is not asking for success. Not by whatever measuring stick the world is currently using, not by money or title or the opinion of people who will themselves be forgotten. It is asking something far more difficult than any of that. It is asking you to care. Genuinely, privately, stubbornly care about the one life you have been handed.
And yet, knowing this, I still forget.
That is my quiet shame and my recurring confession. I forget with a frequency that does not match my intelligence, or whatever intelligence I believe myself to have.
I wake on ordinary days and move through them like a man who cannot see. Because I am habituated. Because the miracle of being alive has the terrible disadvantage of being constant, and the things that are constant become invisible.
The Greeks called it Lethe. The river of forgetting. And I have drunk from it for far too long.
I wish somebody would say this to me. Not once, but daily, insistently, the way you'd remind a man standing too close to a cliff's edge. Not because he doesn't know the edge is there. Because forgetting, even briefly, is the whole danger.
Here is what I mean. The average life expectancy in Japan is eighty-four years-ish. In Nigeria, it is somewhere around fifty-five. I know this. I have known this. And yet I move through my days as though I am Japanese, as though time is something I am swimming in rather than something that is leaving.
Fifty-five years…
And inside those fifty-five years must live everything I intend to be. The reading. The loving. The building. The failing and the standing back up. The mountains I have not yet climbed. The books that will change me that I have not yet opened. The ideas I have not yet encountered that will rearrange everything I think I know. All of it, inside that window, in this country, under this sky.
It is terrifyingly short when you write it plainly like that. And still, somehow, on an ordinary Tuesday, I forget.
Perhaps the most devastating thing about my forgetting is not the forgetting itself. It is the assumption that there is more time. That tomorrow will hold what today is wasting.
And you know what?
Everybody that has ever died believed that, until the moment they couldn't anymore.
This assumption of continuity is so ingrained in us that we cannot fully believe in our own ending, even when we know it is coming. We know it the way we know we are mortal, which is to say we know it completely and feel it almost never. Present in the mind. Absent from the body.
A friend of mine wrote as his parting words leaving university: life is a one time journey, don’t fuck it up.
And it is the most clarifying thing I have ever read. There is a particular kind of freedom that only comes from accepting that this is it. No rehearsal, no second passage through. And that finality, rather than crushing the life out of everything, is precisely what gives it weight. A life you could live twice would mean half as much. The one-time-ness of it all is the whole point.
Sometimes I think about what I am and what it means that this one life belongs to a Homo Sapiens.
A member of the only species that looked up and refused to accept that the sky was a boundary. I think about the long line of humans I descended from. They mapped the stars before they had instruments to do it. They painted caves in the dark with their bare hands. They built the pyramids with mathematics they developed themselves. They sent a man to stand on the moon. Built rockets. Painted the Sistine Chapel.
Every single one of them had exactly what you and I have. One life. The same uncertain, unrepeatable, terrifyingly short one life. No more time than we have. No better raw material. Just the same flesh, restlessness and hunger that you and I are sitting with right now.
That is not a small thing to absorb. These were not gods. They were people who decided that the one life they had was enough to do something extraordinary with. And they were right.
So are you.
That knowing lives in you. I can say that with confidence because I feel it myself. The slightly inconvenient knowledge that you are larger than the life you are currently living. That there is a version of your existence that is bigger, truer, and more alive than the one you are currently settled inside.
I want your life to mean something to you. Not to your parents. Not to your community. To you. The one reading this at whatever hour, in whatever mood, carrying whatever weight.
Because the itch you feel is your most honest self trying to get your attention and it deserves to be heard.
Some days I sit with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Van Gogh, Amelia Earhart, Feynman, LeBron, Ronaldo, entirely in my head, and ask them one honest question. Did they feel this? This specific tingling, this restlessness, this quietly unbearable sense that there is something they are supposed to do with their one life?
I think they did. And I think that is actually what separates them from everyone else. Not talent or circumstance. Just the decision to take that knowing seriously and to follow it all the way.
I want to be one of them, one of the greats, and I am not embarrassed to say that.
The mediocre life is uninspiring to me. The idea of organizing an entire existence around comfort, approval, and staying within the boundaries that were handed to you by people who were themselves handed boundaries, it reads to me like a man who was given a field and decided to live only in the corner of it. The field is yours. All of it.
In a society where mediocrity is too often the standard, there will always be something magnetic about the person who refuses it. Who refuses to define themselves by what is conventional, who refuses to accept that the boundaries they were handed are the actual boundaries of what is possible.
That person disturbs something in the rest of us. Because they are proof that the ceiling was never as low as we agreed it was.
I want to be that proof. And I want you to be it too.
Which means you have to go looking. Widely, without a map. Not just inside the world immediately around you but far outside it. And the furthest you can travel without leaving your room is a book.
Hence you have to read. Urgently and hungrily. The Upanishads. Taoism. Confucius. Aristotle. King. Chavez. Let books do what travel does, which is make the world larger than the one you were born into.
Read people who were solving the same problems you have with completely different tools in completely different centuries. Take what fits. Discard what doesn’t. But read enough that your worldview outgrows the one you were handed and cannot fit back inside its original walls.
Read all of it. Not to become any of them but to understand how many ways there are to be fully human, and to find the one that is most completely yours.
You are under no obligation to be the person the world decided you were before you had a say in it. Find out who you actually are. Because what a waste it would have been to die still only curious about who you could have been and what you could have become.
And all of that, the reading, the looking, the refusing to be boxed, it amounts to nothing without the one thing that actually moves a life forward.
A choice.
A choice, made today, to take your own life seriously. Because nobody is coming to do that for you. Nobody is going to arrive at your door and tell you that today is the day you start living at full capacity. That responsibility belongs entirely to you and it always has.
You are not the same person you were yesterday. You do not have to be. The self is not a fixed thing you are stuck with. It is something you are making, daily, with every choice you make and every choice you refuse. Which means the life you want is not waiting for the right circumstances. It is waiting for a decision.
And what I find genuinely exciting about that is this. You have so many choices. A stupendous, almost absurd number of directions your one life could go.
You could become things you cannot currently imagine becoming. You could go in a hundred different directions and find meaning in all of them. The world is wider than any one life can fully cover, which means you do not even have the luxury of moving slowly.
There is too much to read, too much to see, too many mountains, too many ideas, too many versions of yourself left unexplored. The only genuine waste is to choose nothing. To let time make the decisions because choosing felt too presumptuous, too much like believing in yourself more than the world has told you to.
Believe in yourself more than the world has told you to.
Do not arrive at the end of your life with most of yourself unused.
So risk boldness. Consistently and without apology. It is always better to risk boldness than to settle for triviality. The person who reaches for too much and falls short has still travelled further than the person who never reached at all.
Because in the end it is not your abilities that will define what your life meant. It is your choices. The ones you made when you were uncertain and made them anyway. The ones that cost you something.
Those are the choices that show what you truly are. So make the choice today, to let your life mean something to you.
Jẹ́ kí ayé ẹ kà ẹ lára…
The world is too big and your time here too short for anything less.
And remember above all that you only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
One life. Lived all the way. That is the entirety of what any of us are here to do.
~ Abimbola
Hi Reader, I’m not a motivational speaker, not even close. I’m just obsessed with living an unconventional life and inspiring people to aim higher.
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I cannot even pick a single distinct line-Everything is distinct.
Every word here is beautiful. 😩
Weldone, Abimbola_Diya❤️
Impressive!✨