I have decided to sit down and take stock of my life and the direction I would have it go. It’s not that I haven’t always done this, but it’s a necessary step that I must do to continually appraise my progress and evaluate my goals, measure my successes and effect my impact assessment. This is just one of those series of processes which I subject myself to as I walk through what always seems to be the valley of deaths’ shadows. In this latest of reviews, I have detected a potentially destructive tendency which has silently crept into my life, to the point that I have grown lethargic and insensitive to its full functioning within me. If someone else told me, I probably would have denied with every ounce of passion in me. But this was classic case of looking into the mirror and not seeing your heroic grandfather’s contrived image, but a direct reflection of me talking back to me through the bathroom mirror. I call it the bathroom encounter. The great thing about such periodic personal encounters is that they become the hallmark for major changes in your life, and a reason to be self motivated in doing the right things. This was one of those moments.

As I raised myself up from bending over to get the foamy toothpaste out of my mouth, I had an eye to eye contact with me on the other side of the bathroom mirror. At first I was trying to observe how wrinkled my forehead was, and if my new shaving stick was leaving bumps on my chin, or the neomedrol was preventing them before my sight crept up to the sags below my lower eyelids and I could hear them saying bye-bye to youthfulness. But when my eyes hit my eyes on the mirror, there was a sudden freeze in time, like a subtle permission by nature to be totally unrecorded as passing time. Then he (mirror image) began to question me. He first asked me to look at my crackled lips. I did so and wondered why of late I have battled its constant dryness. But then again I heard him say to me “it is dry always because you talk much and do little.” Still within the corridors of frozen time, I imagined all I had seen with these eyes and have been forced to comment on, but could hardly trace a single memory strand to an effective action I carried out to change anything. Then I looked back at his eyes and it was welling up with tears and wondered why it was crying for me. Then it asked me “are you seeing wrong or doing right?”

Still in the time frozen zone, I ejected myself from the powerful effect of the moment and jerked back to reality of my wrist watch. But that was it. Something within me had changed and was going to be forever so. I realized that I had seen so many things wrong and had allowed myself to become an active commentator and a passive mover. I had seen so much and done so little, hence the troubles all around me seem to multiply. But then I knew that seeing wrong and murmuring about it doesn’t change anything. This promptly reminded me of my famous statement I made back in college school days that ‘leaders don’t see wrong, they do right’. All around me have been several opportunities to be a leader by standing up and doing the right thing, but I blew it by being employed in the preoccupation of grumbling. My mentor had once warned me never to open my mouth except I had value to add and now I was living in blatant disregard for those guiding words. My words were splattered all around yet very little had changed. Later that day, in reconsidering the frozen time in the bathroom, I was resolved to do a few things. (to be continued tomorrow).