Silhouette: Stepping out of the Dark

By Syl-Akinwale Oguntimehin

Silhouette: Stepping Out of the Dark is a mirror by which you stare at yourself and probably discover you are just getting to know who you really are. Its a guide on self-discovery and on personality, character, store of values, locus of control, and ability to be at peace despite the daily challenges of trying to succeed at ones dreams while struggling to defeat inner fears and societal pressures. Its a must read for anyone capable of staring at their self in the mirror with an inner drive to becoming the best!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546224105

Syl-Akinwale Oguntimehin

The author enjoys extensive reading and freely shares constructive ideas when tolerated. His interest in poetry and writing culminated in the 265 paged collection of 161 pieces of his poems titled Echoes of Silence published in 2001, with a reprint in 2002. Akinwale Oguntimehin is a graduate of Philosophy. He also holds a Masters degree in Industrial Relations & Personnel Management. His post-graduation working experience spans over 20 years in Economic & Management Consulting, Human Resources as well as stints in the financial, Oil & Gas and real estate industries. Married to his cheerful wife Olajumoke and fatherly with his adorable children Iremide and Aramide. He hopes to publish more of his manuscripts in the years ahead.

Book preview

2018 Syl-Akinwale Oguntimehin. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/18/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2409-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2411-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-2410-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018900230

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

1 Knowing Yourself

Poetry

2 Paradox of our Lives

Running Waters

3 Change

Raging Sorrow

4 True Happiness

Forever

5 Friendship

Still

6 The Unforeseen

Streaks on the Window

7 The Power of Love

Love

8 Failure & Fear

Sparks

9 Faithfulness

Wailing Marrow

10 Forgiveness

Pardon I Pray

11 Beauty

Chasm

12 Trust

Concert of Masquerades

13 Living Again

Trance

14 Knowing When to Stop

Gamblers Grief

15 Inner Beauty

If Tomorrow Comes

16 Shells

Ire

Ranting

17 Of Memories

Abiku as Kokumo

(Kindred Spirits)

18 When Dream Dies…

Omolangidi

19 When The Petals Fall

Palmwine Dancers

20 Fidelity

Silent Whispers

Gratitude

Lord I’m Grateful

My Candle Smiles

Shigidi

Strength

Tomboy

Wondering how

Wry Smile

This book is

dedicated to:

All who believe in and nurture values that money cannot buy

You who rise above the captive shadows of your past.

Preface

You do not have to be great to start right, but you need to start right to be great. It’s up to you to decide when to start right!

Author Unknown

Let’s write our injuries in sand, and kindness done us on marble, for posterity to judge how fair we have lived.

Author Unknown

If wrinkles must be written upon our brow, let them not be written upon the heart; the spirit should not grow old.

– James A. Garfield

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1

Knowing Yourself

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When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems begin to resemble nails.

- Abraham Maslow

T he best gift you may ever have is yourself, because without it, you cannot have nor appreciate any other gift. Self-love and understanding are essential factors for maturity and success. We each claim so much knowledge of the world around us through our day to day interaction, but how much can we really claim to know of ourselves? Do we really know our attitude, character and beliefs outside what people tell us about us? Have we taken time to examine ourselves to basic components so that we may understand our substantial make up? If you look around, you will see that there’s probably (actually) nothing you have that has not been given to you one way or the other. How much of what you think therefore is real, bias, myth or fiction?

As we are children of different societies, we each grow up with either cherished passion for who we are or repulsion for who we sense we are and might become. This factor explains our reaction to the way people, events, trends, history, environment and time compel us to sway our emotion, action, thought or reactions one way or the other. Sometimes we act lost and unsure of where we have been or headed.

Knowing yourself could begin from meeting yourself again or even for the very first time. This entails asking the question: ‘who am I’? This question is not merely philosophical, but elemental to tracing your roots to the remote recesses of your consciousness and to wherever you can control in your subconscious bundle called yourself. When you seriously attempt this exercise, you will be amazed at how old you are even when you feel you are so young, and at the same time realize how rejuvenating the new knowledge makes you as you realize what power comes to you from this new self knowledge.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

- Aristotle

The answer to knowing yourself lies in the past as your roots, through the present as your reality, to the future as embodiment of your anxieties. You could decide to start with the past for ease of pattern and so track your growth from prior to present events. An extensive and meaningful approach will require that you arm yourself with a pen and paper, writing down the details and figments of memories that characterize your past and spectacular events in your actual existence and fantasies. The bulk of past happenings may be forgotten, yet certain aspects of your past can still be recalled because of either the peculiar things that occurred or the peculiar circumstances in which they occurred. Things you would not forget easily, be they joyful, saddening, traumatic, awakening, personal, etc. Happenings some of which you would rather not admit even to yourself exist, but which constitute or fuel your fear, doubts, strength, dream, nightmares and pursuits in the present. Some of these events are like unfinished businesses with a mental bearing for the future.

I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I need nobody to make me somebody.

- Louis L’Amour

Knowing yourself entails pulling yourself apart to your tiny elements, and studying each aspect of yourself with unbiased interest so as to abstract objective knowledge of each. You need to understand the personality of your father and mother, so as to understand what traits you share and in what proportional dominance. You need to acknowledge the reality of your growing up environment, be they cultural, educational, peer influence, politics, commerce, folklores, myth and belief of the adults around you; all of which affected and determined a reasonable content of your knowledge or view of the world today. If and when you can do this successfully, then only can the sum total of these divergent parts make a meaningful pattern as your present whole. This is the elementary aspect of self-audit. This aspect merely provides you with some reasoning and conjectures you never bothered to come to terms with, but which inadvertently have remained important in your well-being, growth or frustrations.

Identify your values, which I call your strength. There can be many approaches in doing this but we shall be considering two simple approaches. One, how do people see you? And secondly, how do you see yourself? From the two approaches, which image is better, clearer, more pleasant and acceptable to you? Which do you hold superior, others’ perception of you or your own evaluation of yourself? For example how do people (male, female, old or young) meeting you for the first time react to you? How long do such reactions last? How strong an impression do you make at first contact and how well do you care about upholding such impressions subsequently? How much effort do you exert to achieve such impressions? What benefits have accrued from such impressions? Have they been sustainable? If you treat this part very well, you could have a fair picture of how people see you and of how much or little their impressions of you matter to you. This will clearly show you where your locus of control lies – within or without. You can thereby understand your personality better and know what relationship issues may constantly arise for you. Your aversion or obsession for vanity, glory, other’s acceptance, self security, etc will this also amplify.

Problems are many, answers are too. The lives that are broken, the answer is you…

Author Unknown

You are a unique entity in the world, very irrepeatable and important, yet a mere tick in the wheel of time. Have you pictured finding a piece of sand someone dropped from an air-plane on a sea shore? It is a good thing if you enjoy reading, this avails you an opportunity of enriching your knowledge of the world around you. Knowledge for itself is good, but better still is that knowledge should inform. This bulk of information you acquire daily should in turn provide you with a clearer understanding of the characteristics of things around you. When you know yourself, and fairly understand the world you live in, the focus of your day-to-day life and activities then becomes constant reconciliation of yourself, needs, dreams and fears with the reality of the world around you. Your depth of amassed knowledge floods you with information and alternate angles to viewing events. It is however your exposure, contact with the external world by way of experience that sweeps away your doubts, filters your bias, and strengthens your speed of action or reaction to making up your mind one way or another at decision moments. This is because memory holds a stronger impression of personal experiences than the dull intake of historical experiences garnered from books from mere studies.

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.

- Danny Kaye

The degree of success, happiness, frustration, or disappointment you encounter daily is a testimony of your ability to reconcile yourself to your environment. You must be able to identify when you should give in, and when you can bring yourself to bear on the environment to change prevailing factors of the environment to suit and attain your purpose. If you cannot overcome all circumstances, at least you should be able to understand why you can’t or why your inability should not bother you. This is essential because most of the bad times we have are fallouts and gaps between our expectations and actual achievements. As W. J. Bryan opined, destiny is no matter of chance, it is a matter of choice: it is not a thing to be waited for, but a thing to be achieved. Therefore, our happiness or misery depends more on the way we see the events of our lives more than on the nature of those events themselves.

Most times life is neutral. It is without limitations except the ones we envisage, impose and accept by ourselves. It is only those who understand this fact that can hold themselves responsible and work for a higher standard than anyone expects of them. They end up as the high flyers because they never excuse themselves from the rigour of successful pursuits and meaningful differentiation.

People have seen life from many angles and will continue to do so for a long time to come. While some see life from the possibilities of their dreams, others see life as the chronicle of their impossibilities. To some, it is a stage where you act your part of a script you know not who wrote and leave. To others, it is acting your script as written by you and getting the audience to do what you wish of them. For some it is a battle where you fight opponents of shifty nature, with whatever you have, never clearly sure of what the outcome will be, because often times, you move forward to discover your erstwhile ally had been repositioned to take an offensive position against you.

Hold on to your dreams for they are, in a sense, the stuff of which reality is made. It is through our dreams that we maintain the possibility of a better, more meaningful life.

Leo Buscaglia

When circumstances confuse, tease, or tumble you, ripples of your consternation will generate likewise waves that will either rock boats or caress shores. At such moments, you fall back on self-knowledge. If you are however shallow in self knowledge and control, you suffer loss of steam momentarily and people of fickle stamina may lose focus and self esteem. It is very important for you to identify your resource stronghold so that you can retreat when confused and keep within safe bounds until you have regained your posture and confidence to step again into the stream of life. When you feel life has made you vulnerable by circumstances you’d have wished otherwise, keep away from people who think nothing of your struggles or belittle your self confidence if you ever want to become somebody or rise from the ashes of your fall, to your vision of glory.

The key of success and self knowledge lie in your will to become the very best that you can ever be, while staying truthful to your values. You must do what your values support and dictate, otherwise you’d not be able to live with yourself truthfully on the long run. If you become untruthful to your core values, you habour indignation against yourself in a dark recess of your mind and see yourself as a betrayer, cheat, villain, opportunist, weakling, coward or even qualify yourself with stronger adjectives. Then a decision is taken within you, to either retrace your steps, pretend nothing happened or share this secret with a confessor and gradually flush it out though with a possible consequence of tainting prior impressions someone or others may have of you. You could also decide to lock the secret feeling away in a corner of your mind, knowing fully well when buried, it may still pop up in your mind sometimes.

Nonetheless your decision to bury this vital secret will still stir emotions somewhat unpredictably, and subtly unknown to you then, you would gradually but certainly become a slave to this secret. You will increasingly dread any possibility of it becoming known and spend viable time trying to keep it away where no one will ever see or hear of it. Some of such secrets and disappointments grow into obsessions and strong negative passions for which you face attendant price to hush up forever. At such times you become a fortune mine for blackmailers who stumble on history or ingenious masterminds who dare to figure out the missing link of history to your chagrin and despondency. Without notice, sometimes you jump and fret for reasons no one else but yourself can understand when you hear or see something that reminds you of your locked in secret now turning a weighty load on your mind.

Impressions have their relevance, because they are the positive bias we lean on to simplify and hasten our ascent through the passage of life. Good as impressions may be, there are better values, one of which is character. You need to develop a strong character. Impressions provide a lens for people to see, arrogate a status or personality to you even before you justify such classification by your actions, while an acceptable and recognized strength of character provides the reasons for people to see your actions in the true sense of your view and acts, the surrounding circumstances notwithstanding. Often times, when impressions fall apart, strength of character remains. Strength of character like the bamboo tree has deep roots able to buffet the storms of life so much more than impressions that are more ephemeral and like footprints by the seashore easily erased by the waves. Good and predictable character is what keeps your friends by your side when you stumble and fall, because they understand and believe in you beyond the unfortunate bend and circumstance that momentarily befell you.

The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become.

- Harold Taylor

Developing your person means creating your own identity. The only thing that will stop you from creating an identity that can help you fulfill your dreams is you and you alone. You need to break away from whatever engulfing factors dominate your life, be they parental, peerage, friendship, environment, circumstantial or historical. You can’t change the past, but you very well can ruin the present by not believing in the future or staying close to the building bricks of your dreams. This does not imply abandoning shared values, dreams and objectives, but it means drawing a line between what you are doing because you want to please anyone and everyone, and what you are doing because you really need and wish to do it for yourself.

Other people’s opinion of you must not become your sole identity and reality except where they affirm your dreams and person. You can live for others, but it is only meaningful if living for others is synonymous with living for yourself in absolute tranquility. Knowing what you want in life gives you self confidence. Taking your chance to find out what lies in the opposite direction gives you an opportunity to know what you are really made of, for there is really little or no individual identity sustainable in a milling crowd, long-term.

Experiences bequeath a lot of wisdom and strength of character, but they are seldom sweet and often harsh, at least while they last. The gains of harsh experiences lie in memory, they become pointers to avoid similar pitfalls and propel higher success consequently. If you miss an opportunity, do not lose the lesson your loss left behind because a mirror is only as good as the image it reflects. Failure is only possible when your dream is emptied without benefit of knowing why. Anxiety in the face of failure can be unnerving, yet worrying never solves any problem really, rather it depletes your energy at goal getting. Worry enough therefore to anticipate troubles that may come, but never enough as to bring them about.

Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.

- Dale Turner

The benefit of alternate result is knowledge gotten about a process contrary to expectations. Weird? Experience often times is merely a tag we give to the mistakes of our lives. We all begin somewhere and strive onwards with hopes in our hearts for the glory in view, for we cannot build a reputation on what we intend to do and expect others to respect such self valuation, but on what we have actually accomplished. This is because, character is only evident given repeatability of behaviour in trying times just as success is the unbroken trail of glory from dream through fruition amid the curve of life.

Do you understand the didactic nature of values and events? Everything has its good and bad sides. If you hold anything long enough, you’ll see both sides while if you believe in leaving while the ovation is loudest, you may often miss the peak of the action and the mess that follows too. Every benefit you enjoy today has a price you’ll pay in the days ahead, just like any price you pay now has a benefit in stock. Lessons learnt from painful encounters leave stronger impressions on our minds than those of pleasure, hence we forget faster those who help us than those that hurt us.

Do not beg for hardship nor seek it out; but if it comes your way, tackle it the best way you can without leaving scars on your soul. Hardship is part of life, so it will come to us one way or another. It could be in form of limited resources or frail health for ourselves or our loved one. Whichever way it challenges us, we should know that like a scorching sun, it too shall soon set and be gone. Being