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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...
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Sometimes the Markers of Adulthood Arrive

"Sometimes the markers of adulthood arrive, and all they bring is the quiet reminder that we are still ourselves." The new house. The promotion. The fancy dinner. The long-awaited trip. The little victories we imagined would change us. And yet, when they arrive, the feeling is often smaller, quieter, less transformative than we expected. Life keeps moving, and we remain — essentially — the same people we were before the milestone, carrying the same thoughts, habits, and internal rhythms. I have built, saved, and achieved things I thought would define me. Each time, I expected exhilaration, a sense of arrival, a reshaping of identity. And each time, the reality was softer: a subtle satisfaction, a fleeting pride, a quiet observation that I am still myself. There was no sudden transformation, no cinematic moment of revelation, no magic that altered who I am. Just me, in a new context. It is tempting to feel disappointment, to think that the milestone failed to deliver. But p...
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Is This It? On the Quiet Disappointment of Arrival

The other evening, I went for an after-work coffee with two colleagues. Another day, I had dinner by myself — twice — in a nice restaurant. The kind of place that appears often in movies, books, and vlogs: soft lighting, carefully plated food, the suggestion of a life unfolding well. I remember sitting there and thinking: is this it? In stories, this is meant to feel like success. An evening out after work. A quiet dinner in a good restaurant. The kind of adult life that is supposed to arrive once you’ve done the right things. It’s framed as enviable, aspirational — a marker that you’ve made it into a certain version of adulthood. But nothing landed. The conversations were pleasant. The food was good. There was nothing wrong with the experience. And yet, all I could think about was how much I wanted to be in bed. There was no spark. No sense of arrival. Just a subdued awareness of time passing. I’ve been noticing this more often lately — not just with social rituals, but with mil...
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The Future Doesn’t Wait for Permission

I came across a line recently that felt almost rude in its honesty: “The future doesn’t wait for permission.” My first thought was immediate and unfiltered — ain’t that the truth. We like to imagine the future as something that arrives when we are ready. When we have figured things out. When we feel brave enough, healed enough, secure enough. We negotiate with it silently: just give me a little more time . But the future does not listen. It does not pause for clarity or courtesy. It keeps coming, indifferent to our readiness. We often behave as though life is waiting on us — waiting for the right decision, the right confidence, the right moment. As though there is a holding pattern somewhere, a pause button we can press while we gather ourselves. But days pass. Seasons change. Bodies age. Situations evolve. The future takes shape regardless of our hesitation. This is not always dramatic. Most of the time, it is quiet. It looks like routines continuing while dissatisfaction grows ...
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Even Lies Come Dressed in Effort Sometimes

There is a line I heard in a song that has been following me around: “But even lies come dressed in effort sometimes.” At first, I thought it was about other people — the obvious place to start. The relationships that felt convincing because someone tried. The situations that lasted longer than they should have because effort was being expended. But the longer the line stayed with me, the more it turned inward. Because the most exhausting lies are not always the ones we tell others. They are the ones we keep up with ourselves. There are versions of our lives that require constant upkeep. Narratives we repeat so often they begin to sound like truth. Not because they are, but because abandoning them would mean admitting something uncomfortable: that we settled, that we stayed too long, that we chose safety over honesty, or familiarity over alignment. Those admissions cost more than the effort of maintaining the lie. So we try. We show up. We perform consistency. We add small acts o...
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Knowing What Works, Leaving Room for Surprise

Today I went thrift shopping. Anyone who thrifts knows the small, private ritual of it: racks too full, mirrors too honest, time moving differently. As I tried on different outfits, something familiar struck me — not for the first time, but with unusual clarity. How important it is to know what you like. And, equally, how important it is to know what does not work for you. There are colours I reach for instinctively, silhouettes I trust. There are fabrics I already know will irritate me, cuts that have betrayed me before. Knowing these things saves time. It spares frustration. It narrows the field in a place designed to overwhelm. And yet. Every so often, something unexpected catches my eye. Something I would never normally pick. Different colour. Different shape. Slightly uncomfortable, conceptually. I try it on anyway — not because I expect it to work, but because curiosity feels safer than certainty in that moment. Sometimes it’s awful. Sometimes it’s quietly perfect. That sm...
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If Life Ended Tomorrow, Would Anything Really Change?

We are obsessed with imagining what we would do if we were told we had only months to live. The bucket lists, the tearful confessions, the reckless adventures, the sudden confessions of love — they are everywhere in books, movies, and online articles. The message is clear: if death were imminent, our lives would transform in an instant. And yet, I have started to wonder: would they? I suspect that, for most people, life would continue much as it always has. Morning would come. Coffee would be poured. We would get dressed, commute, answer emails, check phones, scroll feeds, and repeat the familiar rituals of our days. Work would still demand attention. Laundry would still pile up. Small obligations would quietly persist, demanding their share of our attention. Even when faced with mortality, human life — mundane, ordinary, patterned — is astonishingly resilient. We have been told, so insistently, that our lives are miserable, boring, incomplete, that we are going about living “all wr...
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Impatience With Our Own Lives

Elif Shafak writes, “human beings exhibit a profound impatience with the milestones of their existence.” The words struck me immediately, not because they were new, but because they were painfully familiar. We live lives measured in moments we can’t wait to leave behind — rushing through what should be the very chapters that make us who we are. We rush past childhood longing to be grown. We rush past adolescence, eager to claim adulthood. We hurry through young adulthood, anxious to “settle down,” to earn, to succeed, to arrive. Even in the middle of life, we chase the next milestone: promotion, recognition, wealth, recognition again. And when we reach the later years, we wish away the in-between, mourning what we should have noticed along the way. Milestones are meant to be markers, not destinations. They are pauses in the flow of life, signposts meant to help us orient ourselves, not finish lines to sprint toward. Yet we have cultivated a culture in which patience is undervalu...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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