THE FISHERBOY AND A WATER SNAKE
Growing up as a boy, I had four passions; reading, playing soccer, swimming and fishing. My movements then revolved around these four activities. If you wanted to find me, all you had to do was check the corner in our backyard, if I wasn’t there with a James Hardley Chase’s novel borrowed from my childhood friend Prince Adéyeyè Sanmí whose parents had a large collections of the old crime thrillers, then you would need to check the playing field of The Apostolic Primary School, Ipetu-Ijesa which served as our stadium then, if I wasn’t there, then you would definitely have found me inside Adodo stream swimming or beside it fishing.
Of all these four activities, it was fishing that I enjoyed the most. This is because even as a boy, I liked solitude and quietness which our home of all girls and only me as a boy could not produce. There was something in sitting beside the quiet stream with my feet in the water and the water flowing gently over my skin that I couldn’t and still cannot explain with words. It was soothing, it was calming, and it was peaceful and I enjoyed it like nothing else. Right from then, I had developed this habit of thinking by myself and turning issues around in my mind trying to find possible solutions to knotty issues. I later learnt that it is called meditation. And man, did I meditate beside Adodo!
The fishing itself though crude was very fascinating. I would buy a small sized hook and a length of shoe sewing thread (Tiranyin) to serve as fishing line. Then I would tie one end of the thread to the hook base and the other end to the neck of a small piece of bamboo tree branch which served as the fishing pole just below a circular neck on the branch to prevent the thread from slipping from the pole. Armed with these, I would find a stone beside a bathroom and lift it up to pick earthworms to serve as baits and string the earthworms on the hooks and place them inside the stream. With these, I caught numerous types and numbers of fish. In fact, I once caught a very strange looking fish that earned me a nickname courtesy of Balogun Abayomi Ojasope Presenter who was the class jester in my secondary school class then.
Photo Credit: Getty Images.
Long story short, I was beside the stream one evening around 6:00pm fishing with a good childhood of mine named Tosin who lived very close to the stream and was a very good fisher and swimmer as well. Suddenly, he stood up and told me he felt like going home. This was disappointing because I had not caught any fish that day after more than three hours beside the stream. When I asked him why leaving so early, he told me his mind was just going home, so I told him to go well and that we would meet the following day. After he had left, I sat still beside the stream with my feet dangling inside the water and my hook inside the water waiting for a hungry fish to come pecking.
Somehow after about five minutes, I became very uneasy and my mind was telling me to get up and go home. By this time, I was the only one left beside the stream but I was used to that and being alone beside the stream had never scared me before, if anything, I actually loved it. But on this particular evening, I was very uneasy for no reason at all. Even though my mind was telling me to go home, yet there was something telling me to wait a little bit more and that if I did, I would catch a big fish. The two instincts fought each other in my head for a while and finally the first one won the battle. I stood up, remove the earthworm on my hook, folded the thread around the pole and hid it among the cluster of bamboo trees and left the stream banks.
As I was leaving, I had hardly walked few meters from the stream when I heard a loud splash behind me. This sound was very familiar to me, it was a sound of something disturbing the calmness of the water by breaking through its surface. It was either something entered the water or something was coming out of it, and from the loudness of the splash, whatever it was entering or coming out of the stream had to be huge. So instinctively, I turned around to find out what happened.
What I saw would forever etched itself in my memory. Coming out of the water was the biggest snake I had even seen in my life. I had seen many snakes at that point in my life both land and water snakes and from experience, land snakes were often bigger than water snakes, but not this water snake, it was the biggest I had and have ever seen physically of either land or water species of snakes, the kind of snakes that are often only seen in movies. But this was no movie at all, it was me beside Adodo stream. It was strolling out of the water majestically as if it owned all the lands around the stream. I was transfixed to where I was. A cold sweat broke out of me and I had a vague sensation of feeling hot and cold at the same time. I watched as this giant of a beast swam leisurely out of the water. It took several seconds for it to fully break the surface of the water and its sheer length and size was astonishing.
The most fearful part of it all was that it came out from the exact spot where I was sitting few minutes ago. It stood there and raised its head while curling most of the downward part of its body. I looked at it and it seemed to look directly at me. Though I was very far from where it was, I was able to stare clearly and directly at it because I was on an upper ground level climbing up the slightly hilly rock beside the stream. Looking at its two fearful eyes, it seemed to be telling me, “Why didn’t you wait for me?” At this point, I ran. I ran like I had never ran before even while playing football. The rock that usually took minutes to climb took seconds and I ran the rest of the way to our house within few minutes.
Looking backward now, I realized that it was only that instinct telling me to walk away that saved me that evening. If I had not walked away from the stream………………….
You see, life is often like this. We may be doing something we so much like but which is yet to start yielding results and suddenly we feel like walking away. While many motivators and people around us would tell us to keep doing it and persevere, I think we should just obey our instinct and walk away. A Yoruba adage says that if we worship a deity for thirty years and it never stood up for us, if we leave such deity, it is not a sacrilege.
Get me right please, perseverance is very important in everything we do. Patience is a virtue and every successful person had had to wait for results at a certain point in their lives, BUT IF YOUR MIND IS TELLING YOU TO WALK AWAY, THEN, BY ALL MEANS DO WALK AWAY. Delaying your walking away in such situations may be dangerous in the long run.
Beloved, are you in a relationship of which you are tired and everything in you is telling you to walk away but your friends are telling you to wait because if you leave now, you don’t know whom the next person would turn out to be? PLEASE WALK AWAY.
Are you pursuing something and you are yet to achieve it but your spirit is telling you to quit it and start a new adventure? People around you may be persuading you to stay with it a little more because your breakthrough is close by, BUT PLEASE DO WALK AWAY and start a new adventure.
The mistake we often make is to take giving up and walking away to mean the same thing. When you give up, you stop trying but when you walk away, you can always start something else and so give yourself another chance to excel. It is said that he who retreat from a lost battle lives to fight again another day. Retreating is walking away, giving up is surrendering in the battle. Walking away sometimes does not signify weakness but strength. It may mean you are strong enough to let go and let God. It may mean you are hopeful enough to know that WHEN THERE IS LIFE, THERE IS HOPE AND THERE IS A CHANCE TO TRY SOMETHING ELSE.
I pray that God would strengthen you to be able to walk away when you really need to do so.
WALKING AWAY SOMETIMES MAY MEAN YOU ARE STRONGER THAN YOUR EMOTIONS.
Success is yours.
Babatunde Idowu Ebenezer
The Last Wordbender™
©July, 2020.