Skip to main content

Posts

The Things We Learned to Live Without

There are things we do not grieve, because we learned to live without them too early. Not because they were unimportant, but because the world rearranged itself in a way that made their absence feel normal. February asks us to speak about love loudly — romance, desire, grand gestures. But this is not that kind of piece. This is about something quieter and more foundational: our capacity for ordinary human closeness. The ease of speaking to a stranger. The courage to suggest coffee without pretext. The ability to sit in someone’s presence without agenda or performance. I think often about how entire generations adapt to the worlds they inherit. Not consciously. Not philosophically. We simply learn what is required, and shed what is not. When I watched a documentary about Hasidic Jewish communities in New York — particularly those who choose to leave — I was struck less by the act of leaving, and more by the origin of the structure they were leaving behind. After the Holocaust, survi...
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

On Love, Capacity, and the Parts of Us Shaped Too Early

February arrives every year carrying a very specific demand. To feel. To declare. To perform love loudly, convincingly, and on time. I do not often write about romantic love. Not because it does not matter, but because in this part of the world, love rarely announces itself the way February expects it to. It is quieter, more restrained, more practical. It is shaped early—by survival, by responsibility, by environments that teach us to endure before they teach us to feel. And yet, February insists. So this piece is for those who love differently, late, cautiously, or incompletely. For those who sense that something in them is capable of tenderness, but also know that life has already left its marks. For those who carry affection in unfamiliar forms. For those who recognize love not as a feeling they lack, but as a capacity that has been shaped—sometimes narrowed, sometimes sharpened—long before the person who might have needed it most ever arrived. This is not a celebration of roman...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Kind of Basket Are We Carrying?

We are often told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The saying is usually offered as financial wisdom — diversify your income, your investments, your risks. But somewhere along the way, we did the opposite with our emotional lives. We consolidated. We placed our need for connection, understanding, intimacy, companionship, and belonging into fewer and fewer baskets, until in many cases, there was only one left. The romantic partner. The spouse. Sometimes the nuclear family. And everything else became secondary, suspect, or threatening. This did not happen accidentally. It happened as life became more fragmented. As communities dissolved. As adulthood became increasingly solitary. In the absence of inherited social structures, romantic relationships were asked to carry what entire villages, extended families, and friendships once held together. One basket began to do the work of many. At first, this felt efficient. Romantic love promised intensity, exclusivity, and meaning....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Disappearance of Normal Adult Companionship

There was a time when companionship did not need to be searched for. It was not something you worked at , scheduled weeks in advance, or justified with a reason. It existed quietly, built into the structure of life itself. In many Kenyan communities, companionship was inherited before it was chosen. People grew up among the same faces, attended the same ceremonies, worked the same land, worshipped in the same spaces. Marriage did not scatter people; it anchored them. Women married into homes where other women were already present—sisters-in-law, neighbors, age-mates—often navigating the same stages of life at the same time. Men remained near their childhood friends, their brothers, their cousins. Friendship was not curated; it was ambient. You did not have to explain why you were visiting. You did not have to perform usefulness. You did not have to be interesting. Presence was enough. Companionship was not a special category of relationship. It was simply life unfolding alongside...
Post a Comment
Read more

Where the Light Stays, I Will Let It In

There is a temptation, at the end of a year, to perform clarity. To announce intentions. To summarize lessons. To package growth into neat conclusions. But life rarely works that way, and neither does understanding. What we often call insight arrives quietly. It does not demand attention. It waits. “Where the light stays, I will let it in.” I have come to think of light not as revelation, but as attention . The moments we pause long enough to notice something true — not dramatic, not flattering, just honest. The places in our lives we keep circling because something there asks to be seen. Over this year of writing, I have noticed how often meaning hides in ordinary places. In disappointment. In repetition. In moments that fail to live up to expectation. In choices we justify instead of examine. In the quiet discomfort of realizing that the story we were telling ourselves no longer fits. Light does not always arrive where we want it. Sometimes it settles where we would rather not l...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man is only as faithful as his options

“A man is only as faithful as his options.” Whether Chris Rock said it or not almost doesn’t matter anymore. The line has survived because it names something uncomfortable: that many of our choices are not moral declarations, but negotiations with what is available to us. We like to believe we choose freely. That our lives are shaped by preference, conviction, taste, discipline. But the longer you sit with that sentence, the more it unsettles you — not just in relationships, but in work, lifestyle, ambition, and the quiet stories we tell ourselves about who we are. What if much of what we call choice is actually adaptation ? Take fidelity. We praise loyalty as virtue, as character. But how often is loyalty reinforced by lack of alternatives? How often does commitment hold not because temptation was conquered, but because it never arrived? The same logic applies far beyond romance. We stay in jobs we “like” because we have no viable exit. We live modestly and call it minimalism bec...
Post a Comment
Read more

Going Home for Christmas, or Staying Away from What We’ve Redefined

Words shape perception. And perception shapes experience. When we misuse words, we misinterpret our lives. In recent years, one word has been quietly overused, stretched thin, and emptied of nuance: burden . We use it casually — to describe family obligations, shared living, hosting relatives, contributing to a household, showing up when resources are limited. But what if some of what we call burdens are not burdens at all, but moments misread through the wrong lens? Perhaps the problem is not the situation, but the definition we bring to it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the slowly fading tradition of going home for Christmas . Increasingly, people choose not to go. Not because they do not love their families, but because home has become associated with expectation, financial strain, judgment, and quiet measurement. Who has made it. Who hasn’t. Who is contributing enough. Who is costing too much. Family, once anchored in presence, protection, and shared life, has gradually...
Post a Comment
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

Daniel Arap Moi — The Shadow and the Shepherd: A Deep Dive into Kenya’s Second President

If Jomo Kenyatta was the founding father, Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi was the long-reigning stepfather — sometimes protective, often punitive, and almost always enigmatic. He ruled Kenya for 24 years, the longest of any president to date. To some, he was the gentle teacher, Mwalimu , who kept the nation from tearing apart. To others, he was the architect of a surveillance state, a master of patronage and fear, the man who perfected repression through calm. This is a portrait of Daniel Arap Moi — not just as a ruler, but as a man shaped by modest beginnings, colonial violence, and the hunger for order in a chaotic time. Early Life: The Boy from Sacho Daniel Arap Moi was born on September 2, 1924, in Kurieng’wo, Baringo, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. He came from the Tugen sub-group of the Kalenjin community. His father died when he was just four. Raised by his uncle, Moi’s early life was marked by hardship, discipline, and deep Christian missionary influence. He trained as a teacher at Tambach ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Not All Disabilities Are Visible

Some pain does not leave a mark. Some exhaustion does not show in the face. Some people are carrying weights that have no name, no diagnosis, and no outward sign. We are used to recognizing suffering only when it can be pointed to — a bandage, a crutch, a cast, a wound. Something we can see. But the human interior is its own world, and often, the heaviest struggles live there. The Quiet Work of Holding Yourself Together There are those who walk into a room smiling, contributing, present — and yet they are holding themselves together one breath at a time. Not because they are pretending, but because they have learned to live with what would overwhelm another person. Some battles are fought inside the mind: The slow grey of depression The relentless hum of anxiety The sudden, unbidden memory that takes the body back to a place it never wants to return The deep fatigue that sleep does not cure And yet, life continues. The world moves. The dishes still need to be wa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Know Thyself: The Quiet Power of Naming Your Nature

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung We live in a culture that equates good intentions with goodness, and ambition with ability. But very few people in Kenya—or anywhere—truly know what they are made of. We can name our qualifications and our dreams. But ask someone their vices or virtues, and they hesitate. Worse, they lie. The Danger of Self-Unawareness In Kenya today, many of us are wandering through life making choices—big, small, and irreversible—without truly understanding who we are. We end up in jobs we despise, relationships we shouldn’t be in, or positions of influence we aren’t emotionally or ethically equipped for. And at the root of this dysfunction is a simple truth: we don’t know ourselves. This is not a spiritual or abstract dilemma. It’s a deeply practical one. To know oneself is to understand your vices, your virtues, your weaknesses, and your strengths—not in a vague sense, but in detail. Let’s ge...
Post a Comment
Read more