First Gentleman with Wilson Orhiunu
Email: babawill2000@gmail.com Twitter: @Babawilly
Some are forced into a shell without a choice. Sentenced to a period of solitude and loneliness, the silence can become torture as the senses are deprived of stimuli. Some, however, choose to voluntarily withdraw into a shell. This is a well-walled fortress which guarantees protection from wicked people and the nasty situations out there.
Non-members of the shell club live in dread of being recruited or slipping into membership due to life’s circumstances. People fear being alone. For no matter how well protected and insulated one is, except for those born to be monks, we all need a bit of noisy distraction sometimes.
Like Freddy McGregor, most folks just don’t wanna be lonely.
Looking back, I hated doing things on my own. From birth till the age of 10, I spent a lot of time with my sister Patience. We walked to and from school together and most of the time at home was spent together. Once I moved to secondary school, I had two main friends, Emmanuel and Awere, till my fourth and fifth year when time was spent mainly with Bisi and Christo. I recall the names because I moved in packs then.
At home, I was always with my friend Yinka especially throughout the holidays and this trend continued for many years. Things got so bad that before one made a 20-minute journey, it was not unusual to spend one hour looking for someone to escort one to the place and back. Sometimes you had to pay the bus fare of your escort just so that you did not have yourself for company.
Many years later I joined a gym and after my induction I did not return for 18 months. Couldn’t go out on my own. It took a long while to wean myself off needing people to ‘escort me’ before I make journeys that pay only me.
Now I am happy to be able to go on long runs alone. I withdraw into a psychological shell, in order to face the winter runs. All alone I run listening to the inspirational voices of TD Jakes, Joel Osteen, Paul Adefarasin and numerous Ted lectures. Incidentally, I run like a snail so the metaphor is picture perfect. Solitude can be dangerous with the wrong attitude. Once the S is taken out of the word shell it becomes Hell. S is for Spirit. The right spirit and attitude are essential when in one’s own company for long hours to avoid the hellish thoughts of past failures and future anxieties. The inside walls of an empowering shell must be painted in the colour of Hope.
I am sure that anyone would be hard pressed to discover any human being who achieved any feats worth talking about without withdrawing into a self-imposed shell.
Those forced into a shell have a harder problem though. A prison sentence can knock out all the positivity from one’s life.
Prisoner 46664, however, was a revelation. That must be the eighth wonder of the world. So many years on Robben Island and then finally walking out free and going on to be President of the Rainbow Nation. Some things in life are meant to offer us inspiration for when we find ourselves all alone. Some will make friends with toxic people just to avoid being alone but they soon discover that their shadows make better friends than toxic people.
Fewer have perfected the lonely walk than the boxer on fight night. He breezes into the arena with a huge entourage and the ring appears full while the announcer introduces the fighters. But when that bell goes, the fighter is on his own. No loved ones, managers or trainers.
There are many such situations that no one will offer to share the experience with you. If you are a bomb disposal expert, your lover will not hang out with you at work even for one minute. Then, of course, the ultimate lonely journey; you die, they choose a nice coffin and they all cry and say nice things about you but you go six feet under alone. No one loves you so much that they want to go with you.
There are some advantages of being in a shell. The main one is you have time to work on yourself and your core skills. Since those in a shell are out of the public eye, their failures don’t ‘go viral’. There is a private space to grow.
All foetuses know this. The place of great transformation is the womb. Starting at the bottom with a few cells, you end up with a baby after nine months with the whole crew there- organs and all. Ironically the word shell is also used for explosives. Many have been known to transit from periods of solitude in a shell to explode onto the scene with great fanfare.
There are not too many party invitations for the one hustling in his tiny corner; that is till he ‘blows’.
Poverty pushes people to places. Take Trench Town Jamaica for instance. In the 60s you lived there because you could not afford to live in a better location. Without the distractions of affluence, The Wailers started rehearsals and soon exploded like a shell.
Bob Marley in his subsequent solo career went on to write ‘Waiting in Vain’. Now, who writes such music without having lived a life where there was a risk that all the hard work will not pay off? The poor living in their ghetto shell know truly well that hard work might prove to be all in vain in the end.
Not many royals and rich kids write songs that stir the heart like this because they had palaces for shells and these are places of conspicuous consumption. They hardly wait for anything!
The ghetto provides more hits than the palaces; true in every country. Straight outta Compton another example.
We are all members of the shell club at different times in our lives. Let’s keep the vibrations in our shells positive to avoid depression in isolation.
