I set up this blog myself shortly after midnight on February 8, 2016. Yesterday, March 8, 2016, made it 30 days. I even had to do the count on my fingers to be very sure of the number of days it amounted to. 30, confirmed! Today, I decided to look back; I never did all along. I just busied with churning out posts and sharing their links on social media – WhatsApp, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I never looked back all along because I didn’t want to gamble with any form of discouragement. Actually, it was always in the plan that I looked back after 30 days of nonstop blogging, to know if to continue or to walk. Yes, I’m a diehard fan of time management, and lately, time revolution. Of course, if blogging isn’t worth my time, I’d walk.

In 30 days, we’ve come a long way! 30 posts for 30 days, more than 1,500 visits, a good number of fans who’ve made it a task to spread the word, kind comments on and out of the blog that fire me on, and God’s generosity with inspiration. Moreover, I’ve especially learnt the following lessons from my so-far-blogging experience:

1. Intention is never enough

The intention to blog isn’t a long time coming. Actual blogging started almost as soon as the intention showed up. For heaven’s sake, it’s your business wanting to do all this and that, but what really matters is ACTION. That night, February 8, shortly after midnight, I remembered that what really matter is action, and I did take one. Simple: turned on my laptop, moved my SIM to my modem, got internet connectivity running, and typed www.wordpress.com on my address bar. That was it! I didn’t have to be a pro. I just kept trying and erring and retrying, and that was it!

2. God makes so much difference

Before February 8, I had done the needful: I prayed. I’m Catholic, and the Blessed Sacrament is central to our worship. Interestingly, I did the planning of this blog in church, before the Blessed Sacrament. I’d always known that the laborer labors in vain if the Lord isn’t the builder. Today, in more ways than I can say, God made all the difference.

3. It’s gradual and gets better with each passing day

Yes, I know the number of people that visit my blog. I’m told by WordPress. There’s even a bar chat to that effect, and there’re stats for all the posts. I make bold to report progress. It’s also interesting to report that the very first post has the least number of views, and then it started growing and growing and growing. Yes, life is evolutionary, and things grow gradually. Get used to it and don’t be discouraged when the figures ain’t soaring like the eagle.

4. Everything conspires to your favour and it gets easier by the day

Maybe we’re called bloggers because blogging is a way of life. Yes, it is. Even as I type this post I’m already working on that of tomorrow in my head. I can even let you into the title already: “The vocation of sitting down.” Interestingly, too, I began to work out potential blog post from events and people around me. For instance, after meeting with Ijenna last Saturday, I did a post about her shortly afterwards. Again, after closely seeing the US presidential stuffs on CNN on Saturday night, I did a post about it on Sunday. Even tomorrow’s “vocation of sitting down” comes from a conversation I had with a friend at Bigard Memorial Seminary yesterday; it was his idea and I already have his permission to do a post on it.

Furthermore, things just keep falling in place. I’ve had to travel many times over the last 30 days, and can report that I’ve done this blogging from about 10 different laptops; I really don’t travel with mine. Things just keep falling in place. When it became compelling that I needed a domain name, my friend Johnpaul come to the rescue, and I’m thankful. And that’s where the God-factor comes in; it always does.

5. “As you let your light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same”

Those are the gracious words of Marianne Williamson, and they are true. In the past 30 days I’ve challenged my friends to rediscover their writing spirit, and some of them have. They tell me. I’ve made others realize that whatever is conceivable is achievable.

In this way, I’m convinced that www.corneliusndubuisi.com is bearing a hand in making the world a better place.

 

Today, I especially celebrate my mother, Agnes, who loves me far more than I can say. Let me say something about her. Like Lincoln, I dare to say that I owe everything to my angel mother. She did not not only sit and watch my infant head, nor were she only always there for me; she provided me a ‘balanced love’, exactly the quantity I needed to turn out a great kid. I especially remember two interesting episodes with my mum. At the age of less than 10, about 7 I think, she gave me the beating of my life in an open market; it took the market women some time to rescue me. That was allowed in the 20th century when I was born, but the 21st century now brands her action child abuse. Truth be told, I deserved that beating and I’m better for it; no amount of talking would have corrected me. Again, as a primary school pupil, 5am was my rising time, as joining her to church every morning wasn’t optional for me. Others could stay back in bed, but never me.

And so, my mother’s life instilled in me respect and admiration for women. I see her in every woman. In fact, the wonder of every woman’s being moves me to heartfelt praise to God their creator. How better would the world have been without them? Adding my testimony to that of God, it was never a good idea that the man should be alone. I like to immediately revisit the Garden of Eden episode, where women got the infamous and notorious reputation for being the reason why things fell apart. In truth, Eve was true to her calling, she wanted to see her man to the next level on the scheme of things; she wanted to move the family of Adam & Eve from humanity to divinity. Was this not a noble aspiration? Of course, her action was sin but her intention informs us to be fair in our condemnation of her. How would God have become man if not for Eve, even? And then she kept some of the fruit for Adam; Adam shows up to partake in the eating; God shows up to do the cursing.

Have you bothered to reflect on the role of Adam in the Fall? Methinks that Adam is to blame, and God himself gives us clues as to why he is to blame. The woman receives the fruit and eats it, and she neither goes naked nor calls God’s attention. Adam shows up and joins in the eating, and they both go naked and attract God’s attention. Didn’t God know that it was Eve who set the ball rolling in the first place? If he’s omniscient, and he is, and so knew it was Eve all along, why then did he fire the question at Adam? Fact is, he expected more from Adam; Adam should have known better; Adam should have guided Eve aright. But he didn’t. So, why are the children of Adam, my fellow men, taking it out on women? That’s not fair.

Having attempted to lift that pristine blame, I now wish to announce that women are a dignified set. Fact. One may not fully understand this until one sincerely tries to imagine what life would have been without women. For me, miserable is the word. The whole motherhood argument, that is, the argument that women deserve respect because they’re our mothers, is too obvious and simple. All mad men probably know that. But there is more. Even the mere fact of their being around is something great. When we see them, when we hear them, when we feel them, when we smell them, and even when we [taste] them, we feel something out of the ordinary. We’re ready to take a bullet for them; an entire country called Troy was wiped out because two men wanted a woman. We appear to be ready to do anything in the arms of a woman…

Personally, I try to be objective, I try to be realistic, and I try never to forget the one woman who loves me more than I can say and the fact that many a woman shares those same attributes for which I hold her so dear. Again, I try never to deceive myself, too. If at the end of the day I’m sure to hook up with a woman, get married to her, and get to rank her only second to God my God, it is high time I started getting used to appreciating and celebrating womanhood. And today, International Women’s Day, is a good day to start.

Gentlemen, let’s pop some champagne on our women! 

There is undoubtedly an irresistible drive and a seemingly unquenchable thirst in every human person to attain the status of genius – a quality by which one is said to be exceptional. William Shakespeare is the envy of many a writer; Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have become deities in the sciences; Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are household names in the philosophical circle; too many people wish to become a Bill Gates, a Steve Jobs, a this or a that. Oh! If wishes were horses, beggars would ride ahead of royalty.

But genius is a state of being, a way of life, an attitudinal disposition, a value orientation, the product of consistency in the rightness of our choices and the soundness of our decisions.

Genius is multidimensional. A shrewd businessman is as genius as a distinguished academic; a spiritual avatar is no less than a scientific trailblazer; and just the ability to be exceptional is genius. To some, such as the whizkids, genius is a birthright – they couldn’t help but become one. But to some others it is a struggle to becoming, evident in the longing for and the motioning towards.

At this juncture, those that have genius for their heritage are at liberty to quit reading this piece. Although the idea of natural genius is highly debatable. However, for those of us that share the fate of having to work out genius by the sweat of our brow, this piece is a must-read.

The 3 Steps

1. Interest. That you were attracted to this piece is the very first step: that thirst, longing or drive that propels one to seeking after genius. However, too many people score an A or even A+ here. Let’s progress.

2. Count the cost! That genius is not bought for cash does not mean it costs nothing. Indeed it costs more than mere cash can ever afford. However, the nature of the cost is so complicated that even a beggar could pay without having to go abegging. The cost is time, energy, and old unproductive habits; the cost is you – because all of you is involved.

3. Do the treasure hunt! If genius were not a treasure, then becoming one would have been as simple and as common as to having to fetch a sack of sand from a beach. But it is a treasure, sought after like diamond and gold. Where can it be found?

… in the words of our fathers, on the lips of babes, on the pages of books, in the gossip of the neighborhood, in the cresting on shirts, walls, and vehicles, on that sheet of paper you just stepped on, on that newspaper you just set on fire without reading, in that argument that ensued between your cab driver and the traffic warden. It is written all over you: your very life whispers it to you, the trees around chorus it, and our dreams reaffirm it

Now, all you need do is get the right tools for the hunt: your senses and your reason. Like every other human being, use your senses to collect the various data of perception, but employ your reason to make unconventional meaning out of them – for which you become exceptional.

When you see it from a different angle, when you listen to it with rapt attention, and indeed perceive it beyond the average man’s compare, then genius is not far away.

In the final analysis, you won’t fine genius anywhere because genius is not found; you become it! And we move from genius to more genius as we intensify our quest for it. Sounds bad? I would have told a lie if I said something different.

Become genius? Yes, you CAN!      

The heat is on! Right now and every second the likes of especially Democrats’ Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the one hand, and Republicans’ Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ted Cruz on the other hand, are buying their way into the mind and heart of America’s electorate ahead of November presidential polls. Why is the planet agog with the nitty-gritty of the forthcoming US election? Understandably, the one who emerges US president, succeeding Obama as it were, will be as good as the globe’s president, given the enormous influence the US wields on the global scheme of things. However, I doubt that that singularly accounts for why it is commanding global followership.

Side by side the American experience is Nigeria. Electioneering in Nigeria, the much I know, and I can assure you I know enough (at least I played presiding officer for one of the polling units in the April 2015 polls), is a mess at best. Truth be told, a whole lot depends on the credibility of the electoral process: it instills faith in the government and reinforces patriotism. For me, it’s high time we learnt one or two things from those who are better at doing it, such as:

1. Money should go invisible

There is no gainsaying that the politics and the economy enjoy a husband and wife relationship. Yes, they do. And so, every election is run by so much money. Publicity alone on the various media runs into mega-millions. Of course, not to mention the crazy mega-millions that must be paid into the accounts of the various and varied gatekeepers and gods and goddesses of the land. In the US this money is invisible while in Nigeria it is shared on the streets in raw cash or its material equivalent. The invisibility of the US cash leans on the fact that campaigns are adequately, transparently and accountably funded, converting most of the cash for services procured in the furtherance of the bid for the White House. In Nigeria, our recent “Dasuki-gate” reveals it all; even our dear media appears to have been largely compromised.

This is the problem: the visibility of cash in the process compromises credulity; it makes it bribery and not the lobbying that it should be; it corrupts the minds of the electorate.

2. The candidates themselves must command followership

For months, all the candidates must build followership either from the scratch or consolidate on what they used to have. They must be charismatic enough to demonstrate their suitability for the White House and their particular ability to bear the larger-than-life image of the US among the comity of nations while stating and negotiating their interest without mincing words. In this regard, it is almost never clear that a particular candidate is being sponsored by this or that individual, since it has to be clear from Day 1 that the country is never to be held ransom by the whims and caprices of those sort of sponsors. We can do better than we’re already doing. Yes, the party is important, but it is always the individual that must bear the character of the party.

3. The media is a major and independent stakeholder

There is no doubt that Nigeria’s media is part and parcel of the electioneering here, but the challenge remains as to whether she is true to her calling as the fourth estate of the realm. Of course, running a media outfit is business, but devoting to driving positive social change at critical moments as poll time is a social responsibility. In Nigeria, while the media focuses on paid publicity and just gets by with debates and analyses, the American mainline media takes every inch of the steps towards the polls seriously. The debates are superhot and the analyses leave no one stone unturned. In America, the citizenry can confidently depend on CNN, for instance, on the in and out of the elections; and CNN always delivers.

4. Electioneering is everyone’s business

Knowing the implications of a free, fair and credible poll on the furtherance of the national course, the average American takes everything about her elections personal. They are there for the rallies, the primaries, the debates, and on poll day; they’re there for virtually everything! And almost all US elections are near-perfect. The reverse is the case in Nigeria, where the voting is not urgent, and optional at best. This has to change.

Conclusion

America is not perfect; the name calling characterizing the current American presidential race, especially as championed by Trump, is not virtuous. But her electioneering has got a lot of lessons for us. And we’ll be doing ourselves a whole lot of good learning from them. Thanks to Arinze Nwafor for his generous insights on the US elections.

On this platform, I talk about things that matter to both ‘collective-us’ and ‘individual-me’. I especially talk about books and celebrate legends, and since February 8 I came onboard blogging I’ve enjoyed the grace of consistency. However, this grace of consistency was threatened today; I’d travelled and really couldn’t figure out how to compose the post or even what to compose. As soon as I met Ijenna, I just knew something was up! And I didn’t hesitate to immediately ask her permission to talk about her here. She neither said yes nor no, but was surprised that a guy she just met for the first time since Adam would want to talk about her on a blog post. I insisted I would, which is what this post is about.

I’ve chosen to spare us the details of how we got to meeting; let’s leave it at providential. However, the rich content of our little more than 2 hours chat is what motivated this post. Walking out of that teaching hospital (yes, a medical student), I became better in the following ways:

Grace is real
Here was a girl who has it all! She appears to have beaten the four-fold criterion for classing the ideal woman: Behavior, Brains, Background, and beauty. Don’t ask me how I knew; I just knew. The brains and beauty part were pretty obvious; I used to know the background; and I trusted that the behavior was consistent with the background, plus I experienced some of the behavior for myself today. When I pointed this out to her, Ijenna and I were unanimous in attributing whatever she’s got to grace. Grace is real, and always real. And there is plenty of it for each and every one of us. Just ask it!

Vision is everything
A friend once told me I’d make a fine journalist. Ijenna would have said same if she had to. The questions I was firing at her were just too many for my own count. But this Ijenna of a lady keeps wowing me with answers that set my brain afire. Though still a medical student with some time left for graduation, she already had everything figured out. She demonstrated to me that vision is everything. Methinks I’d be crossing the line revealing those of hers here; all I can say is watch out for her in a few years to come.

Teacher par excellence     
Moved by my questions, she taught me some medicine. I’d read about caesarean operation but didn’t quite get the basis for the distinction between the vertical incision and the horizontal incision. What Ijenna did was unbelievable. She simply raised up her wrist, made two moves on them, said just a few words and I magically understood what she explained like forever. She taught me other things: what happens with and around pot-belly, the real gist about cholesterols, the art of eating healthy, and what happens with the heart. She just had this way of explaining everything so well.

Sophisticated simplicity
This collaborates with her being a teacher par excellence. Medical jargons didn’t come anywhere in the picture. There was no need to as she always had her way of getting around them. Where she was obliged to use them, she always had to produce and keep producing ‘layman-friendly’ synonyms until I got the gist. This sort of simplicity is a sophisticated one. It is a sort of simplicity we should all aspire to.

Conclusion
Today, more than ever, meeting with Ijenna made me realize that there are amazing people out there; all you need do is become amazing yourself and then reach out to connect with your kind. She particularly told me that life’s got levels and we all get to, by our actions and inactions, decide where we belong. If in her turn she gets to write about me, I’m confident she wouldn’t say she wasted her precious time.

What a blessed day! I should especially thank Ugo Okoye for making it happen.