Musings in Solitude

By Oluwole Komolafe

Oluwole Komolafe reveals what life is like for everyday people in Nigeria and shares observations on traditions throughout the world in this collection of essays.
Each essay is a standalone piece of work and can be read as a separate story, but they’re all connected. The various characters you meet show that life in poor communities shares some similarities with more affluent places. In reading the essays, you’ll note how poverty can be inherited and transferred from one generation to another—just like inheriting riches. Poverty can also take various forms— encompassing a lack of knowledge, spiritual awareness, and money. The author also tackles challenging topics such as poverty rooted in societal structure, poverty rooted in environmental development, and what communities sometimes take for granted. He also explores how poverty can cause the masses to engage in dehumanizing professions to earn a living. Join the author as he shares a snapshot of life in Nigeria and the themes that unite us in Musings in Solitude.

Oluwole Komolafe studied Industrial Engineering at the Technische Universitaet, Berlin. He is an ardent student of philosophy and classics and has published many other books on African wisdom and philosophical reflections on the life of man. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, with his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663229793

Oluwole Komolafe

Oluwole Komolafe studied Industrial Engineering at the Technische Universitaet, Berlin. He is an ardent student of philosophy and classics and has published many other books on African wisdom and philosophical reflections on the life of man. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, with his family.

Book preview

MUSINGS IN SOLITUDE

Copyright © 2021 Oluwole Komolafe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

All bible quotations are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2978-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2979-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021920119

iUniverse rev. date: 10/21/2021

Contents

Author’s Note

Preface

Chapter 1 The Tripod

Chapter 2 Hello, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

Chapter 3 Aging while We Wait

Chapter 4 Little Things around Us That Matter

Chapter 5 Man, the Schemer

Chapter 6 No Plan B

Chapter 7 My Tribute to the Hardworking People of the World

Chapter 8 My Lockdown Experience

To: Rhoda Omotunde Rotimi Komolafe;

Rotimi,

who stayed with me

for better, for worse.

Author’s Note

I talk; at best, one or two persons listen.

I muse and talk; more persons listen.

I recall my thoughts, and I make

a memorandum of it.

I write my musings in a book; the

world pays me homage.

But when you read my book, I still remain a mirage,

Lost in the labyrinth of the mind.

For, when you get there,

I will no longer be there.

Preface

The idea to write Musings in Solitude first occurred to me at 2:20 a.m. on April 22, 2017. I scribbled a few words about the book in my iPhone Messenger and sent it as a text message to myself. This is what I usually do when something occurs to me in the middle of the night, which I would like to remember the following day. The jottings in the text message later formed the framework upon which the first chapter of Musings in Solitude was based.

For the better part of 2017 until 2019, I was engaged on other matters that took my time, and I had to put the idea of writing the book aside. I occasionally ruminated on what the finished book would be about. During this time, I managed to finish, to some extent, the first chapter of the book. However, it was not until January 2020—and particularly during the subsequent lockdown in Lagos in March 2020 due to the coronavirus—that I was able to concentrate on writing the book, and set a target for myself that I should finish the manuscript by December 2020.

I was able to meet the target, and the finished work was to be sent to my publisher before the end of the year. I paid for the publishing, but just before I sent the manuscript, some personal events happened in my family, which would require me to alter considerable parts of the manuscript. I was not able to get back to making the necessary changes to the manuscript until five months later. Now, back at my writing desk in April 2021, I am faced with the arduous task of having to change some real and personal stories that have previously been carefully crafted in the manuscript into an anonymous artwork of tapestry in fictitious wordsmithery. I hope my readers will take it to be entertaining if they discern seeming facts in the book that have been twisted and made to look like fallacies. After all, Musings in Solitude is supposed to serve the purpose of being a good work of craftsmanship and penmanship and a citadel of knowledge that will provide an insightful collection of my thoughts and hopefully find a place on the bookshelves of the libraries of my readers.

Musings in Solitude is a compendium of my random jottings and essays on the everyday people of the world, an account of my encounters with some people I have met in real life, and some anecdotal personal events in my life, which were revealed to me when I sat in the company of myself in solitude. My observations and interpretations of the mental notes I made during my encounters with different people as I crisscrossed Nigeria form the bedrock of the pensive writings in Musings in Solitude. The issues I read about the peoples from other countries around the world are part of what is contained in Musings in Solitude. Most of the stories in the book are real, but I have used pseudonyms to protect the identities of some of the characters where necessary.

My experience of spending many hours in solitude during the lockdown has been very helpful in terms of having enough time to concentrate on writing Musings in Solitude. It also allowed me to have a free flow of inspirational thinking. In a way, spending reflective moments in my own company has turned out to be my new way of life as I have become more introspective and able to engage more in cerebral issues.

Now that I have completed my self-imposed assignment of finishing writing Musings in Solitude, another question has been plaguing my mind: What next—and which other new mountains of life should I seek to climb?

My answer and the strategy I will employ is simple:

To lay me down, my mind bare, and in tranquility.

My mind released from the yoke of the burden of the clay of self,

My mind receptive to new ideas,

Knowing fully well that someday in the near future,

An idea will come to knock on the inner door of my mind,

Prompting and nudging me, saying:

I heard that thou seeketh me; here am I, findeth thou me.

Chapter 1

The Tripod

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For brevity, in the context of this book, the tripod stand will be called and referred to simply as the tripod. Talking about the stand is the same as talking about the tripod. The tripod is composed of the upper part and the lower part, the part on top and the part below, the one, inseparable from the other. Aside from the three legs of the tripod is that concentric upper part, underneath which the legs stand. The three legs act as support, and without them, there is no tripod.

There are exceptions to the rule about how to extricate the legs from a tripod as man learned the intricacy of the geometry of balancing objects on top of one another. As far back as primitive times, when man discovered he could turn malleable terra-cotta into shapes and pottery, in order to create stability and balance, our ancestors secured the cooking pot so crafted on three stones, not on one, not on two, but on three stones. Learning from the example of the terra-cotta pot on the three stones, man later constructed the three-legged tripod and joined the top to form a concentric base as support. The contraption was named a tripod.

In the context of this discourse, the three stones as support for the cooking pot is not a tripod, and neither is the milking stool, which also has three legs for support and stability. The support for the cooking pot and the milking stool may look like a tripod and may also serve the purpose of one, but they are not tripods. So also, the one-legged stand, a device used in photography is not a tripod in the sense of our discourse, though, like the three stones for the cooking pot, and like the three-legged tripod, it may serve the purpose of one.

If we temporarily take our eyes off the three stones as support for the cooking pot and closely examine the three-legged tripod, we may see similarities that will link us to the origin of things and show us how matters evolved and how they relate to one another to meet the basic human needs.

In ancient cultures, the tripod was used as a sacrificial altar, but it has recently gained wider applications in use. The tripod is used in photography, surveying, the laboratory as a stand to carry beakers, in the battlefield to provide stability for heavy firearms and artilleries, and sometimes elegantly designed for use in homes as lampstands.

To give the tripod its needed support, the legs must be stretched out and must be made to stand apart from the vertical center. It is the same in construction; in order to carry the weight of a building or a bridge, the beams and columns must be arranged to stand apart from one another. It is also true in life; to get the best result in a relationship, lovers sometimes need to maintain and create respectable space between one another, leaning on the lessons of the wise man who once said, Move too close to a woman, you get burnt, too far away, you freeze. By extension, in the spirit of fairness and impartiality, the same must be said in relating to a man. There are life lessons to learn from the bond between the moth and the alluring hot searchlight.

In like manner as it is in the case of the tripod and its legs, there are matters in life that are intrinsically linked to one another as presented in nature as well as it is in things made by the hands of man. Nature forged hydrogen and oxygen in its mystic furnace and combined both to make water, and when pseudoscientists attempted to separate water into these two elements, the essence was lost. Hydrogen acting alone cannot quench thirst—and neither can oxygen. It is the combination of both in the form of water that serves the purpose of quenching a thirst. In their separate forms, they each find relevance in the laboratory of the chemist. Hydrogen is used as rocket fuel or welding gas, and oxygen is used as life support, as a rocket propellant, and in sustaining life in submarines under the sea. In like manner, the legs, when detached from the tripod, must seek another identity and purpose.

Pensive, and continuing in wonderment at the intricacy of the works of nature, I stopped for a moment, reminiscing on the fact that even in nature, there are those things that cannot be separated as in the case when water is broken into its constituents of hydrogen and oxygen. The man and his soul, the man and his inquisitive mind, the music inscribed on the tablet of the mind of man, and the man and the knowledge stored in his brain are examples of such things, which, in order to exist in their relationship to one another, are conjoined and cannot be separated from one another.

Simply put, what is being said above is that there exists side by side in nature matter that can physically be separated into its constituents, and those other ones that though exist separately, are indivisible. Such matters can be seen in the example of the composition of music. The lyrics and music, which are all part of the composer. One person—but many in parts. One part, physical; one part, ephemeral; and one part immortal. The three as one, coexisting and inseparable. The physical is the man, the composer of the lyrics. The ephemeral is the music, heard but not seen, and that which is immortal is the living being in man, invisible and not discernible.

As I sat by myself in aloneness of spirit, my mind wandered about the entity called man. Man, throughout his lifetime, in pursuit of knowledge, starts learning from the womb, where he is said to enjoy certain flavors and smells even before he is born. For a baby, when only a few hours old, the ability to suck at the mother’s breast is instinctive. Babies are said to start processing languages when they are only a few days old, and they are said to enjoy rhythm and music very early in their lives. In the cradle, a baby learns to be aware of his environment, and in the first few days, he learns how to put all five senses to use. In the first three years, the baby will have learned as much as an undergraduate in a university studying science would have accomplished, and by the time the baby develops into an adult, he would have become a repository of knowledge and wisdom.

Now half awake, I stopped for a moment and thought some more. What if all the knowledge and the memory stored in the brain of man in his lifetime could be downloaded virtually into a computer for later use. Could it be connectable to a virtual afterlife storage database in such a way that though the body may die, the brain need not die with the body? Dr. Albert Einstein’s brain could continue to function, and his thoughts on the theory of relativity could be updated from where he stopped when he died on April 18, 1955—as if he was still alive and actively engaged in further developing his theory.

Charles Darwin’s brain will certainly need to revise his well-researched work on the evolution of mankind; the soul of Darwin, having met face-to-face with his Creator, perhaps was made to answer queries on his