A note of thanks!

I’m not what you call “ambitious”. “I’m happy with the little I have”, I have been heard saying hundredth of times, “So long as I’m left [alone] to enjoy it”.

Among my many fellow college graduates, I’m the only one who stayed in an organization I hated, and in relationship that took it out of me, for more than 4 years! When I finally left both, against my own free will, that is, I was on the verge of a breakdown.

I used to think that was because I was humble. I even took pride in it. Paul has taught us to say “for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content”, has he not? And, anyway, not expecting anything saved one from disappointments! For somebody used to having the ground underneath her move, sitting tight was more important than all earthly goods put together.

I ofcourse learned later that I was neither humble, nor as modest and immaterialist as I fancied myself to be. That what I was is scared: of failure, of people, of the kind of discipline every ambition requires! That I was and am lazy. And that may have been why I’ve always wanted to be a writer. A job Zadie Smith called “a non profession”: of sitting at home & reading and complaining. A place where one doesn’t need to move a muscle to “discover the world” and failure to write is a creative glitch that goes by the fancy name “writer’s block”.

I admire people like Birhane Negussie (of Seifu Fantahun & Co.) who can raise from “the dust” (with wings of an “eagle”), and with not much to go upon, can get to a place where they can have their opinions heard. Never mind the value of that opinion or if one can call it that! “Ordinary people”, Dostoyvskei called them, common & unimaginative. Law makers, law keepers and prophet-killers. Who are only there to make sure humanity continues. Etcetra. [But what does Dostoyvski know? He was a writer!!]

Nay! They are the inventors, the liberators! The shakers and the movers! The bold and the beautiful children of nature who neither compromised, nor made excuses, but held life by the throat until it gave them what they demanded! They are, in short, the Oliver Twists of the world: the boy who asked for more. And got more. Humanity should be grateful to them. Because, if it wasn’t for them.. I can’t imagine which stage of evolution we would still have been in :-).

So.. Salut!