Right In Your Pants...

I remembered an urgent call I needed to make, so I began looking for my phone. I freaked out when I couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere and was about telling the person I was on the phone with that I would call back because I was looking for my phone… then it hit me “you’re holding the phone to your ear stupid”. What in the world was I thinking?

You know, it’s like how you misplace your reading glasses and you look everywhere around the house, in the car, and in the most ridiculous places; you’re not sure why you’re checking in the fridge, but you’re desperate to find it so you check the fridge, twice and the oven, just incase. Just when you’ve let the frustration of loosing your glasses get to you and you sit down to sulk for a minute, you realize it’s been sitting on your head all along.

I’ve had issues with car keys as well…

I heard a Nigerian proverb in one of Frank Edwards songs, it says“Wetin you dey find for Sokoto, dey inside your shokoto” That got me thinking about how we go round in circles searching for what’s already in our hands. Most times we end up missing our blessings because we expect them in bigger packages, shining amours and glamorous places. We tell ourselves that if it’s good, then it’s got to come after hard labor, in far away lands, across oceans, over mountains, through caves and forests, thus we don’t bother looking in our hands, or stopping to figure out if what we’re looking for has always been right there with us, the best friend we see as just friends, the name in our phone book, the idea we wrote down years ago, the small town you live in… You just never know how close you are to what you need most because you just keep looking everywhere else.

Sometimes expectations from self and people are so great that we fail to look around us in a bid to meet up with what is expected and have sleepless nights over ‘what people will say’ when they see you’ve chosen what’s best for you. Its time to stop trying to grasp at ideologies of what should be and choose happiness. The happiness you find in that thing that’s in your hands, rather than pretending to be happy with what people expect of you.

Celine Dion sang “Right in front of you. Right in front of me. We were looking for somehow, somewhere we couldn't see. But the love was always there. It's been around us everywhere. I had to fall to finally see. That you were right in front of me..”

Right in front of you… right inside your shokoto… right there in your phone contacts, right in your best friend.

Sometimes all you have to do is to stop and search deep within for what it is you’ve been looking for... love, wealth, peace, joy, whatever it is.

* “Wetin you dey find for Sokoto, dey inside your shokoto” means 

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Whatever you are looking for in Sokoto state(a state in Nigeria) is already in your trousers/pants (shokoto)