Love Life: Live It Like Meg

My 13 month old toddler loves to be awake!!! Yes, so much so she fights her sleep all the time and can push it for up to 2 hours . But when she does  sleep, she almost always wakes up with a big smile on her face (if her sleep is interrupted, you won’t get any). An infectious smile that can easily be interpreted as ‘oh, I'm still here, where all the fun is’, and it makes you want to pick her up and plant kisses all over her face.

*You will be getting lots of Meg -inspired thoughts, she has been a fountain of inspiration since she was born*

Then I thought, what if I can live that way. Facing every waking moment with a smile. I confess it’ll be hard to ignore the body pains that I wake with on nights that she insists on putting asunder , the ever present feeling that plagues my sleep: how to create time for myself and  the string of tasks always waiting to be done. I'm always racing against time and my guess is, so do you.

We get so busy with life we forget to live it. We forget to smile, hug, hold hands and sit down to chat just for the love of hearing each other’s laughter. It’s worse with all the ‘aiming higher’, not being mediocre’, standing out from the crowd’ messages we hear every day. We are on a race to outdo ourselves and the next person, we often lose sight of the flowers on the path of the race.

I remember looking at the autumn trees and thinking, ‘even the withering process has got its own beauty. It inspired me to continue living each day not minding the circumstances, to see the beauty in my difficult seasons and know that as the same trees that wither with beauty in autumn, bloom again in spring with splendour , I will continue to rise no matter how many times I fall like the withering leaves.

I have resolved to live like Meg. To embrace life with a smile, telling myself I will get through it (in tough times) and stopping every now and then to count my blessings. I've had more downs than ups but every of those down times got me to reflect and conclude that I am far better alive than dead. Like when I broke my two arms (complete fractures) in an accident, I knew I could've ended up paralysed or even dead but I still live a normal life even if I can’t lift heavy things or I just get to carry my daughter for very short periods while standing.

A clearer picture (that I would never forget) will be that of a very young fresh graduate I met in Abuja Nigeria in 2012, who was travelling to another state for a job interview. A month later, I heard she died on her way back from that trip on a route I had plied countless times. I knew it could've been me on one of my endless trips during my job search days. Every time I remember that pretty young lady, I say to myself I’d rather be alive and jobless than dead, so I won’t give up just because I don’t have a 9-5.

So if you are alive and still struggling to achieve your dreams but you seem  to have more downs than ups, I challenge you: remember the autumn trees, remember some people have died in the past trying to reach where you are today, remember to stop and smile, to say to yourself, ‘I’ll get through this’. Remember to love life and live it with gratitude.