Notes on Living is a column of considered points of view about how we are co-creating this life. What stirs our hearts? What feeds us? How do the challenges that animate our most frequent thoughts move through us, individually and collectively? What has life shown us about itself? How are we finding belonging and making meaning/healing in all this?
Here, Segun Agbaje, a writer, photographer and economist in Lagos, writes about experiencing transitions in the company of dear friends and strangers.
Repeat Until Death 🎶 | March 2022
“What if the goal is to be forgotten, to be erased so that one might emerge as a new thing? Why is the idea of loss so often attended with grief and fear? Has loss, not sometimes, shown itself to be a different kind of finding? A different way of being?” - Tochi Eze, Because We Grieve The Tearing of New Beginnings, Project Exodus.
I am dragging on a blunt, staring into the distance. The leaves of the Moringa and the sugar canes are fluttering, as the sun sheds the last of its light. This is the first of many last days before I bid goodbye to the place I have called home since 2001. My father’s house, made of pillars – all four of them –, an arch, a balcony, and a familiar warmth. Whenever I have the chance to return, if my mind is not in a hurry, I take in the bisque-coloured, time-worn walls as I walk from the estate gate. When I knock on the gate it’s always that familiar rap against metal. I can hear in the distance, from either the kitchen or the front door, either a loud bang or a gentle tap of wood, I can hear the footsteps approaching and sometimes I can tell whose it is just by listening to the pace.
There is a tinge of sadness to my leaving, as there is to every leaving. Mine is weighted by things said and things left unsaid. I will miss this place of memories. This place of love. This place in which I discovered the wonders of kinship – how a person can be different, but still be for you.
*
I spent most of my day making calls to clients, trying to sell them the next best thing to sliced bread: loans. Easy loans, in fact. But between the spaces of my voice echoing the terms and conditions, I would grab my phone, rereading for the umpteenth time this quote by Tochi Eze:
“This is what I know: what you lose in the face of transitions was perhaps never really yours to keep. I say this as personal conviction not as a rule. It is good to grieve the tearing of new beginnings, but it is better to yield into the nudging of your own life whistling to you from all your tomorrows: This is what I am ultimately learning: be willing to go, in the manner of all clichés, down the “uncharted” path. Be willing to hunger. And by doing so, maybe we will find that it is true that there is an economy of life much better than that we have known. But how can we tell except we are willing, and except we go?”
My life is littered with moments in which I stumble on artefacts, those pillars with which we want to anchor the decisions of our lives, because they are the nearest things to fate. I am in transition. And I now understand why I am moving in a way that surprises myself. I am an active participant in the changing dynamics of my life. There is still the push and pull of fulcrums and pulleys beyond my control; there is still the echo of luck in my life. But there is acknowledgment of my need, my thirst. Of my longing to be seen.
Every journey I made last year was to reclaim myself, regardless of my failing—and much joked about—waist. It is because of Lomé that I know there is still love out there for me. It is because of Tarkwa Bay that I found the courage to carry on, in hope. In Tarkwa Bay, I learnt that for my life to become music, I am required to hold it with passion. It is because of Casa, that I know that I am beautiful, regardless of my wounds and the promises yet to come… that what saves us, more times than we care to admit, is true friendship. It was in Kpalimé that I understood that sometimes beauty will come at a risk to your life; keep your hands up and your camera pointed at the view. Let nothing be wasted.
Godspeed 🎶 | Photograph 🎶 | July 2021
“As creatures made of time, we live in the present and the past and the future all at once, continually shaken by all the fears and hopes, all the anxieties and anticipations, that are the price we pay for our majestic hippocampus – that crowning glory of a consciousness capable of referencing its memories and experiences in the past, capable of projecting its goals and desires into the future, capable of the bleakest despair and of the brightest dreams.” - Maria Popova, Losing Love, Finding Love, and How to Live with the Fragility of It All, The Marginalian.
We are on the train heading back to Lagos. Ibadan has eased some of the burden I have carried with me all year. I spent the last two days chasing water, sunsets and happiness, and now, surrounded by the chatter of strangers, I am confronted by an existential question. What is the right way to remember a journey or better still, what is the right way to document a life? I want to remember every feeling and every moment, every breath taken in wonder, every view that held my gaze, that brought me closer to peace and freedom. The weight on my soul is the weight of leaving, which is also the weight of turning away from beauty. There is a memory I want to keep with me, of a lake, so still and so calm; of trees so green and so strong. Benita describes their trunk as having flawless skin care. There is a forest, lush and beautiful, and a dam, the water gushing through the waterway with such force and purpose that its sound becomes music. This is living water, taken, used, recycled, given back—the earth sown by people and replenishing itself.
I want to believe that we travel to open up new spaces of freedom in our minds and our hearts and in this opening we are able to reclaim old dreams, and to forge new ones. But most importantly we are reminded of movement, of how it is that the steady rain that pools into a river, and that the river can be dammed to ensure there is relief even in dry season. To see the world is to reclaim your soul constantly.
*
I have a feeling that I am blessed. That I can anchor my life to work and hope and art and faith, and it will all be worth it. Every breath counted and accounted for. - from my notes app (2022)
It is the 25th of March, Sade’s birthday. I am seated on a stool beside a field, beside a road, beside my friend Bernard. It’s the end of an era, and you can feel it in the air. It’s been so long since I last had a beer in hand, carried by that feeling of a man who has toiled for a day, and is glad for this small cold reprieve, with familiar voices and familiar jokes; an honest frivolity that sustains.
Bernard talks about how the essence of life is to set off on your own, to find your own, wife and kin. This he believes is the real balm to calm restless spirits. What I take, more than the advice, is the conviction.
“What is lost in movement?” - Kemi Falodun, Lagos to Lomé: Reflections on Borders, Olongo Africa.
I went back to Ijoma Road, almost nine years later. It was probably the strangest part of our trip. I wanted to confirm that things change. That I truly have aged and that love means a different type of surrender now. The reeds are overgrown and have blotted out the surface of the water. I get that aching sense of neglect like love left this place to itself a while ago, and nothing else can make a home of it. I’m not sure what I was hoping to see—maybe the trees still green, and the hedges trimmed, the silence punctuated by the birds and the rustling, by the habitual lone rumble of a passing vehicle. Yes, I was hoping to see relics of my old life. We don’t make it past the building when I call the cab man to come and pick us up.
What you are never told is that to be resurrected, to be made new, to be, by all accounts, reborn, is to also be willing, to somehow hold all the lives you have lived. To accept your failures. To acknowledge your dreams and dwindling faith, and to finally lay it all down to rest. You have to lift your shadow to the light; this is the part of you that is deserving of healing, this is the deepest spring and the valley of your nurturing.
Passenger 🎶 | August 2022
“No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honouring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.” - Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found
I am afraid that moments are just that: moments. That the beauty of a past day is only for that day. That it is impossible to drag that peace you felt across the landscape of time. Isn’t the ephemeral spring of healing eternally replenished?
Harder days will come, and soak you in their violence and lack of love. But when you have beauty, when it can still be felt deep in you where your soul, dreams and fears reside, I beg you to feel, to dive in, to swim in the glory of your found peace. The problem is not that time passes, it is that we fail to make use of all it has given us. Drink till you see the base of the well.
*
Everything ached with newness. Later, I would tell my friend how cliché but true the moment felt. I could make out the scent of a morning fire; I could smell the flowers, for the first time in a long time. I let the tears streak down. I am trying to be okay, to reclaim the parts of me that count. I am trying to love myself again. What truly breaks me to my core, is how I am more than certain that I am loved. Everyone that counts is telling me to lean into the heaven of my dreams; they are holding my hands, reminding me that I never was alone. The buildings blur as the bus pulls me closer to another departure from home. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.
 | A guest post by
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This, to me, feels like a case for travel. I find that travel always changes me, usually in a way that is necessary for that phase of my life. I liked this
Thank you for linking me with that Tochi Eze's essay