For Men Who Seek To Be—But Lost.
To keep things less messy, we need to seek help and direction.
You are not regarded as lost until you realise you're lost !
Mehmet Murat ildan
There was a pending disaster at work. One of our many electric wires got naked and dared anyone bold enough to touch it and ask why. As you know, bare wires are dangerous. Not only was this particular wire dangerous, but it also rendered every metallic stuff around it unsafe.
Nobody could touch anything. Not the table, the desktops, or the drugs at the back store. One of my colleagues, weirdly obsessed with walking barefooted, had to put her shoes on.
This wire was sitting there, slowing down the day's business.
Now, all my colleagues are women. From their faces, you could tell the responsibility of attending to that situation fell on one person, me.
I looked into their expectant eye. Really? Me? I couldn't fix that. I didn't even know what was wrong or how. However, judging from how I carry myself around, with the things I know and talked about, they assumed it was something I must do.
While I was contemplating whether to go for it, or not, randomly I remembered something that that happened years before.
I was about nine or ten. And I almost died got electrocuted. It was so close that if I weren't saved in minutes, My life book would've lasted just nine chapters.
Pretty interesting story.
One beautiful Sunday afternoon. I had finished eating my routine lunch, the popular Nigerian Sunday rice and stew. That Sunday was different because we brought soft drinks home from church, making the lunch much more exotic than it should be.
It was a great day.
Finishing this meal, I had two choices - to watch a movie - usually, we would peek through our neighbor's windows to watch the good old home videos. On a great, generous day, they would let us in and have us sit like captured, paraded criminals. It was some funny experience. I had a choice between doing this and going out to play footy with the boys.
I missed the boys.
But there's a little hitch to making this possible—my mother. Weeks before, I had severely bruised my ankle while playing, and I wasn't wearing any boots that day. Then this kid, wearing one, stepped aggressively on my ankle. It swelled like a ball and was so painful that a thin swish of air around it made me writhe in pain. I could have well avoided the injury if I had listened to my mum.
Well, I didn't. And almost haven't fully recovered. But I was itching to go. I needed to see my mates again. It had been five weeks, and they were the only people that made me happy. I needed some of those again: the laughs, the jokes, the banter.
And again, the problem? My mother.
But I had to disobey. Sometimes, you must go against the rules to get what you want. My ankles weren't fully healed, and my mother didn't want me there. But I had to because even as a kid, I needed that experience again.
Within a few minutes of my childish indecision, I again found myself on the field. When my mates saw me, I could tell from their eyes they missed me. At that moment, nothing mattered. Not my ankle, and not my mother. I was just happy to be there, playing again.
And there came another, well, a bigger mess.
While playing and enjoying ourselves, our ball fell over the fence. This is a usual occurrence, but the people who live there always throw it back to us. However, this time, that didn't happen.
Since I hadn't been there in weeks, I was told the neighbors had relocated, and there was no one to throw it back. So someone needed to climb the fence.
This kid Kachi volunteered. He had been doing it since my absence and had already instinctively gone for the fence.
I called him back.
I wanted to do it, and I wanted to announce my presence and my comeback — and impress them.
I immediately jumped on the fence without issues. I landed on both feet and felt my ankle, but it was nothing. I scanned the ball's location while standing in one spot, but I didn't see it. I started moving and searching.
One thing was strange about the other side of the fence. It was once a clear land with short grasses that had become muddy with tall, now elephant grasses. The whole place didn't look where I should be at that moment. I wanted to return to my mates.
But without the ball? — I volunteered. I needed to be that guy.
I went even further up this other side of the fence. I stepped on things I wouldn't step on a regular Sunday. Broken bottles. Faeces. Any other things that made it a rather disgusting memory. Just close to the fence adjacent, there was the ball! I rushed a few distances to pick it up. The thick muddy ground had already swallowed one of my footwear, but I didn't care. I had the ball.
While heading back to the fence, my left foot stuck to the thick, persistent mud. Since I had already lost the right footwear, I didn't want to lose the left one. My mum would kill me. I could lie my way out of losing one. But losing two is suicide on my part.
While trying to force my left foot out of the mud, I lost balance and grabbed this metal pole to regain myself - immediately, I shot straight to the wall, and everything went blank.
My last memory at that time was someone trying to force my mouth open; that was all I could remember.
So what happened?
The metal pole I touched had this charged wire wrapped around it —A product of lazy electrical work. It was the reason the neighbors abandoned the back of the fence. My friends knew. I assumed they got too excited and forgot to notify me.
How did I get lucky?
The kid I mentioned earlier, Kachi, didn't hear from me and jumped over to know why I was taking too much time. He saw me on the floor unconscious, then raised the alarm.
That alarm saved me. And here I am decades later, almost in a similar situation. Not gravely identical, but I need to be that guy again.
Like my mates, I had these women looking at me to do something. The choice was there, and I could choose not to do it, bitch out and wait for the electrician, or look for the wires.
I mean, what's the worst that could happen?
I had an idea. I needed the digital Jedi, YouTube. I quickly opened the app and searched for precautions for handling bare wires. The first video was more of an introductory lecture than a how-to video. I abandoned YouTube, picked the first three precautions from Google, and continued with the process.
And here's the thing. To find this mischievous wire, I needed to take a little shock. It wouldn't cause much damage as it did when I was younger, and it was more like a guide - like trying to locate a candy blindfolded, in a bowl full of nails. The nails will prick a little but you're going to get the candy.
Needing this shock was unnecessary because I didn't need to do all this. The solution was there and I was just avoiding it. I was giving out the instructions; pass the screwdriver! Pass the gloves! Shift the tables! Switch off this and that socket! A real mish-mash of confusion and orderly pretense.
I looked like I knew what I was doing, and people around me believed so. I sustained this fake competence for the next 45 minutes to an hour.
I was about to steal another hour, but my hands were already in the pile of wires. Incredibly, I accidentally touched the bare wire — like I intended to anyways.
The experience was overwhelming. I felt like Nikola Tesla dumped some unused bucket of volts on me, and my body reacted rather amicably. I felt a jolt and that was it. However, I forgot I was de-escalting this mess under the desktop table. I wanted to stand and stretch, but I hit my head beneath the table so hard - that desktop on it fell and shattered.
I called the electrician.
Again, that's the business of men not leaving things they can't handle.
I had the option of waiting for the electrician, but I didn't.
I understood basic, essential electrical work. I could identify black and red wires and knew electrical work's positive, negative, and neutral parts. But on the most profound and practical levels, I had no reason to believe, no proof, in any job, life, event, or by chance, that I could fix those wires.
This is what happens as men. We are not just living— we're continually trading in the business of being that guy. Not asking for direction and believing we are born to fix everything. To find everything and never leave things to be.
It's the element of being a man; to flood everyone around you in hope and dependence while fighting to put out the fire you lit in yourself.
To act like you can handle it all - you have everything under control. The boat you're on is already snapped in half. You have the chance to hold a loose branch and let it go - but no. You still want to nail it. It's the boat or nothing. Even if you're close to falling 60 feet down the waterfall, you still believe you can save the damn boat.
Look at the world and how messy it is. Men built a lot of stuff and beautiful stuff —with great expertise, outstanding imagination, and innovation. However, our instinct to ignore or acknowledge our lack of expertise for a task - to concede and accept our deficiency, insufficiency, and chronic stubbornness to our lack of preparation- plays its role in whatever bothers you about the world today.
I had the option of never leaving home and never going into that field. Climbing back at the fence without the ball—but I didn't.
And all these could be attributed to non-admittance that we are lost sometimes. Men are required to have direction and are not allowed to show they don't know something.
This behavior usually comes from a common criticism, innate analysis, and plain mockery of men who dared to look confused - or lost.
Taking being lost deeper, I learned how to pretend I knew what I was doing from my father. An honest, upright, and informed man who I believed couldn't do anything wrong.
At some point in my life, I believed he was a hybrid superhuman who could do just about anything. Almost like he was born with a problem detecting antennae and an inbuilt manual to solve them.
I thought he always knew what to do and how to handle every situation.
But it was all pretense.
He couldn't get himself to appear confused or lost in my presence. And for that, he inadvertently laid a somewhat detrimental foundation that I probably needed years and years of practice to overcome.
I remember this day. I think I was 11 or so. I just passed my common entrance exams, and we had to visit this school I was supposedly posted. I knew the school, the location, and the route. Unfortunately, they left that location the past month cos it couldn't contain the newly admitted students.
Fresh off the following Monday morning, we set out for this new location. He led. I followed. Bus after Bus—but we didn't seem to be getting closer. In times like this, the usual thing would be to ask for directions. But he didn't. We kept going and going. He intentionally took me to a local restaurant to eat.
But I wasn't hungry. I knew he wasn't also, but he needed that spot to plan his next move. I wanted to remind him that we could ask for directions. What stopped me? I didn't see a lost man. I saw a man who knew exactly how to make others believe he knew what he was doing.
We ended up missing the new location and a few crucial appointments — and eventually, I didn't go to that school.
And that's the burden most men put on themselves.
You shouldn't blame us. We are problem solvers first and experts later. Like demi-gods without the heavenly fizz to say, "Let there be light ." So we pick our screwdrivers, our testers, and any tool that can help to make light ourselves.
Sometimes it works. We get a dim light, but most times, it doesn't. Why? Because we’re not heavenly beings. We're just us and should learn to just let it be. We can't do it, and that's it. Maybe that's the required direction, letting shit we can't do be.
And this is how fathers should model themselves. Sometimes we need to let kids know that we have flaws, we don't know it all, and not everything needs figuring out. We can hide our insecurities and drop the superhero cape when it gets too heavy.
From this, kids can learn how to give distress calls and decentralize problems. And most important, how to ask for directions and leave things beyond them alone.
If you enjoyed reading this, you can subscribe to get more. If not, you can f…..off….Just kidding. You can subscribe below