UDEME RALPH

“Nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.” Marcus Aurelius      The world is full of noise and distractions. If one is not careful, one can get completely drowned in the noise or swept away by its abundance. Some people, unfortunately, are already getting drowned, and they don’t even appear bothered. They see nothing wrong with their state; they’ve not yet recognized the noise as noise. They see it as something entirely different—as something good and desirable. They label it “civilization” “sociability” “blending” and so forth. Great souls, on the other hand, look at the matter differently. They, too, are friends of civilization and of technological advancement, but they are careful not to get drowned. They love to interact with people, but they wouldn’t let such interactions get in the way of their personal growth. They have simply discovered the power of solitude in a world of turbulence and trivialities.

    Unto us a child is born. Welcome, dear baby. Welcome to earth.     So what next?     Several years await you; several lessons to learn. Your legs must learn to walk; your tongue must learn to talk; your frail little hands must learn to write. After few months, you're able to walk and run around. You've mastered the alphabets and have learned the strange ways of arithmetics. Well done.     What next?     More learning. More schools. More failures and exploits. And now, after years of pensive yearning, days of sitting at home doing nothing, you're in the university. Welcome to the system. Your travail is unspeakable. Already, after just a year, you're talking about stress and frustration and countless sleepless nights. You're eager to graduate, and you desire to do well at all cost, to be among the best. In a blink, your dreams have turned real. Well done. But you're not satisfied.     Your mind no longer dwells on lectu...

The human race is in a serious mess. Here we are, helpless and miserable, battered and bruised, hopeless beyond words. Ages have come and gone but our shackles have lingered. Day by day, our pains surge. Our maladies remain. Hither and thither, evil acts abound. Our best efforts end in misery; our best minds stink. Our technologies, our inventions, all our fine theories and logics, our greatness and grandeur, only pave way for greater despair. Every new policy draws us to the brink of nuclear war. Every path leads to doom. Our heads bloat with ideals; our tongues flourish with promises of paradise and Utopia.  We long to live in the stars, to sail accross galaxies, to rule over the universe. We dream and dream and never stop dreaming. "Better world! Better world!" We cry out. "Change! Change! Change!" we keep crying. But has the world gotten even an inch better? Has anything really changed since the days of Napoleon or Hitler?  We say we're wise and able, but ...

      There is a great channel, an almighty means by which men get almost everything they want in life. That means is called God. And as long as “God” meets these needs, as long as He satisfies these longings in the hearts of people, He remains relevant, needed, sought, and worshiped. And in that case, He becomes something more than an end; He becomes a means, a middleman, some kind of noble pathway for the attainment of nobler heights.       People generally call God lofty names—Almighty, Alpha and Omega, the King of Kings, and so forth. On a philosophical plane, God is often conceived of and portrayed as the noblest, the most perfect, the unmoved mover, the Great one at the Peak of being. All these point to one thing—the supremacy of God. People, believers especially, have the trite tendency to refer to God as their “all in all,” and to make allusions to self-abnegation, self denial and other things of that sort. But deep within, ...

On a cold and rainy night, Walter, a world-weary thinker stayed up to write a short story about a writer. At first, the idea seemed absurd. Even so, his obsession with absurdities made it desirable.   Before him was a blank sheet of paper, time-yellowed, resting somberly on his reading desk. The light from his lamp was growing dimmer and dimmer; but he had to write. He had learned to exploit his growing sleeplessness by writing—writing anything. He named his protagonist “Okoro” and plunged immediately into the burden of whys, how, where, when, and who did what. At first, his mind was blank, blanker than the paper before him. He knew nothing about this creation of his, other than this: that he was a writer, with a name like that of a typical village chief. He was not very good at details, especially at faces, and heights, and other things of that sort. He was not actually a writer, so to speak. He was a thinker, a master of the abstract, the metaphysical, and of countless exi...