First Gentleman with Wilson Orhiunu
Email: babawill2000@gmail.com Twitter: @Babawilly
We are all full of faecal residents, that is, if we choose to believe what our detractors tell us. Perhaps there is a little truth here. Occupied intestines lie deep inside everyone. We take our guts to parties, to work and out running. Some go so far as calling their deep premonitions ‘gut feelings’. Hidden under skin and designer clothes, these organs of chemical reactions stay hidden from the outside world primed for war. Eating is war but it does not always seem so.
All warfare is deceptive is a saying hued out of the pages of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The food on a plate in a fine restaurant knows not what is in store as it sees itself transported on a spoon past lips coated with lipstick and then past a row of beautifully set white teeth. As soon as the first bite hits, the food soon knows that the mouth that kisses also has a killer bite.
The intestines are one smelly slimy place but the good news is that it is a smell proof chamber and impervious to death-carrying bacteria ready to take out their landlord at the first chance.
People talk about all the haters out there plotting mischief while they omit to realise that the real haters lie within them. They say that an ocean faring vessel is not threatened by the depth of the surrounding waters but by the waters that may get into it. The enemy within is most lethal. We all practically walk around with non-ticking bombs inside no matter how beautiful our bodies look. Our guts can teach us a lot about life. It is our own internal workings that slow us down. Not some imaginary foes out there. We have a war on in our minds and the number one enemy to personal progress does not lie in a faraway politician’s house but in our hearts. Feeding on garbage is a personal choice and we always look like what we ingest.
In university we labelled those who begrudged folks their good fortune as bad belle people. In my medical school class, really envious and bitter people were deemed to have ‘peritonitis’ which is practically the worse belly ache you could get. This type of painful rotting of the insides makes you scream for the surgeon, undertaker and local vicar all at once. Every gut has the potential to rupture and release those bad bacteria onto the intestines and its covering peritoneum.
There have been people who went to bed and got woken up by peritonitis in the middle of the night; the enemy within! The mind is like the gut. It must sieve through what looks like good information to extract the good and kick out the junk.
We must take the good with the bad. Food is essential but it must be digested. The gut is a battlefield where food stays on one side and the digestive enzymes on the other. They fight it out and the food usually gets it in the neck. All its defences get broken down and it is stripped away for ‘parts’ which represent the spoils of war. The defeated food army gets flushed down the drain and completely forgotten.
Sometimes the food sides with allies like salmonella and win some strategic battles but these are only transient victories. The ‘house’ always wins.
Life is one big fight. The higher occupants of the food chain conquer the minnows and turn them into intestinal residents where every single good thing is sucked out of them to the benefit of their conquerors. The chicken might have had some job satisfaction when it is laying its egg but the breakfast table beckons.
Life is not an easy battle. We must manage the war zones within and stop focussing on external threats all the time. The battles within are constant and needful. Our lives make progress only when we realise we are filled to the eye balls with intestinal residents that must pay rent till they can no longer do so. Then we evict them speedily making room for the next tenants.
In summary
There is a constant battle on the inside
If things go wrong on the inside it may be lethal
You must have something to work with; steady input
We take in toxicities without knowing
The quality of our inputs determines our future growth and development
The resident enemies are greater that the external threats; hence friends are close and enemies much closer.
