LOSING PIECES OF MYSELF - First published on my facebook page many years ago.

On Losing Pieces Of Myself!
For as far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a writer. I wrote clumsy poems about everything that touched my heart in my university days. I wrote in a journal and I recycled a lot of interesting words in my head but I never really wrote my soul for the world to read. I left my story to become a silent scream in my heart that formed coherent thoughts mostly when I am in the shower. I often said to my friend Jodi Miller that " I should write a book" to which she always replied "you should" My friend Aisha Adams should also be a writer because I have read many deep and beautiful words that she has written in pain and in love. There are many other writers out there who have thought of beautiful profound wisdom that fade away in the pages of the book they never wrote.

I watched two movies today on a long haul flight; one called collateral beauty and the other whose name I cannot even remember because I forget things. It's what I do; not consciously but somehow inevitably. The collateral damage movie was about death, time and love and it is the motivation for me to start writing today. As this is not a movie review, I will not go over the movie. I can only tell you that it reinforced 3 things I somehow knew on a subconscious level.

1. Death is not always a bad thing. Death could be healing, death could be salvation and death could be freedom. My people sometimes refer to God as "Alapadupe" ( The one worthy of thanks even, in the face of death) I understand this logic because I know that there are fates worse than death, otherwise, suicide would not be a thing.
2. Time matters, yet time doesn't matter. Never let time stop you from finding yourself. It is never ever too late to find the pieces of yourself that you have lost. Still, a soul needs to understand that it can only live within its body for a limited time so anything you require a physical body to do should not tarry.



3. Little is known about love because it's so complex and could mean many things to many people. If love was an animal, it would be a chameleon, beautiful in all its changing colors yet retaining its core characteristics ( now that's an original Arinola analogy)

And I realized that I have lost some very beautiful pieces of myself over the last 40 years. I have also gained new pieces but it has only dawned on me that I didn't need to lose all the pieces that I lost to accommodate the new pieces. It took a really long time for me to understand that I had enough soul to accommodate many branches and to evolve while maintaining my core. I didn't have to trim the branches that produced beautiful flowers to accommodate more growth, I only needed to weed and feed my plant.
I have grown, I have evolved, but yet understand there is a lot more depth to attain.

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