LIFE HAPPENS

by Joseph Adenuga

Many people believe they have life all figured out…but sometimes it just doesn’t turn out the way they planned it. Why? Life Happens…C’est la vie, the French will say.

Once upon a time a pretty woman was serving life sentence in prison. She was angry and resentful about her situation that she decided she would rather die than to live another year in prison. Over the years in the prison she had become good friends with one of the prison caretakers. His job, among others, was to bury the dead prisoners outside the prison walls. When a prisoner died, the caretaker rang a bell, which was heard by everyone. The caretaker then got the body and put it in a casket. Next, he entered his office to fill out the death certificate before returning to the casket to nail the lid shut. Finally, he put the casket on a wagon to take it to the graveyard and bury it. Knowing this routine, the woman devised an escape plan and shared it with the caretaker. The next time the bell rang, the woman would leave her cell and sneak into the dark room where the coffins were kept. She would slip into the coffin with the dead body while the caretaker was filling out the death certificate. When the caretaker returned, he would nail the lid shut and take the coffin outside the prison with the woman in the coffin along with the dead body. He would then bury the coffin. The woman knew there would be enough air for her to breathe until later in the evening when the caretaker would return to the graveyard under the cover of darkness, dig up the coffin, open it and set her free.

The caretaker was reluctant to go along with this plan, but since he and the woman had become good friends over the years, he agreed to do it. The woman waited several weeks before someone in the prison died. She was asleep in her cell when she heard the death bell ring. She got up and slowly walked down the hallway. She was nearly caught a couple of times. Her heart was beating fast. She opened the door to the darkened room where the coffins were kept. Quietly in the dark, she found the coffin that contained the dead body, carefully climbed into the coffin and pulled the lid shut to wait for the caretaker to come and nail the lid shut. Soon she heard footsteps and the pounding of the hammer and nails. Even though she was very uncomfortable in the coffin with the dead body, she knew that with each nail she was one step closer to freedom. The coffin was lifted onto the wagon and taken outside to the graveyard. She could feel the coffin being lowered into the ground. She didn’t make a sound as the coffin hit the bottom of the grave with a thud. Finally she heard the dirt dropping onto the top of the wooden coffin, and she knew that it was only a matter of time until she would be free at last.

After several minutes of absolute silence, she began to laugh. She was free! She was free! Feeling curious, she decided to light a match to find out the identity of the dead prisoner beside her. To her horror, she discovered that she was lying next to the dead caretaker.

The morale of the story? Just in case you think you have it all figured out, think again and be flexible with life because Life Happens.
(An Award Winning Toastmasters Speech-Oct2014)
*story adapted from an anonymous article 

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT EMPOWERS

by Joseph Adenuga

I have heard it many times and I am sure you must have heard it too that “Knowledge is Power”. Indeed knowledge is power, but why does it seem that we misconceive “Knowledge is Power” for “Education is power”? Do we think that Education is the Knowledge that truly empowers? Or can we be empowered by knowledge without Education?

What I will be speaking about this afternoon is not just another Toastmasters speech but a deep pondering I had some months back. I wondered if we equate Education to Knowledge and Knowledge is Power then what could be responsible for producing countless number of educated people who are not empowered as it were?

I will be asking many questions today just to give you a glimpse into my pondering mind. So is it possible to be educated and not knowledgeable? I would say yes because knowledge that truly empowers is not only about the acquisition of information regarding a trade or skill. According to the renowned scientist, Albert Einstein, “Information is not knowledge”. Knowledge that empowers transcends also into knowing about YOUR SELF, ENVIRONMENT and HISTORY.

Let’s take a look at Knowledge about SELF. How many educated people do not know their height, their weight, or the colour of their own eyes? Certainly, personality could be responsible for attention to some of these details yet the knowledge that empowers starts from there.

Knowledge about ENVIRONMENT. Again I ask how many educated people bother to ask when the house they live in was built, how many don’t walk around their neighbourhood to observe the most recent changes and ask questions. They are Educated but seriously unaware of changes in their immediate surroundings.

And what about knowledge of HISTORY? And this is really where my emphasis is today. We didn’t just happen, we came from somewhere. How many of us educated people at any point ask, who our ancestors are, what characterised their times or what lessons can we learn from them? What about the history of our nation. And this is very touching to me because with my little exposure staying in few places around the world, I have listened, watched and observed how people relish in the facts that they know about their history. Sometimes they even make commercial gains from them in form of arts, museums and exposition which some of us may have patronised. And I ask myself, where is our heritage? Where is our heritage when we have branded our mother’s tongue as a sign of illiteracy? Vernacular we call it.

Through all my pondering I realized what really empowers is Knowledge and not Education. This type of knowledge cannot be obtained by just sitting down and being fed with information as it is done in most schools. It is only obtained by asking Questions and when I say questions I mean internally generated questions.

Let me try to explain how learning works. Our memory is only set to learn when a question has been generated by the memory because now it knows where to place the answer it finds. Our memory becomes so resolute that it fails to pay attention to information provided that is not an answer to any question it may have. Thus making learning of information it is not seeking fairly difficult. We can categorize the questions the memory asks into 3 main categories corresponding to the needs that arise internally.

The first is Intrinsic-Interest: these are questions asked with the desire to know something out of curiosity.

The second is Goal-Instrumental: these are questions the memory asks to try to figure out how to go about achieving a goal.

And the third and the most important is Expectation Failure-based explanation: these are questions we ask ourselves in the process of resolving a failure in order to modify memory so that we will understand better next time.

Fellow Toastmasters and guest, I will not do well if all I have come here to do is only to enlighten you of what knowledge is and what it is not. Rather I would like to charge you and let you know that we would fail ourselves if we get all the education we can get and yet not truly empowered, it would be a waste if we entrench ourselves with numerous information at our disposal yet not empowered.

What questions are begging for answers inside you? Start asking them, align your education experience around them and search for answers. Surely in no time knowledge will come and power will be yours.

(An award winning Toastmasters Speech)

First Time Experiences

by Joseph Olalekan Adenuga

Sometime ago we listened to our delectable and very inspiring TM Mobolaji Adenubi as she gave her ice breaker, she made a profound statement that will not leave me in a hurry, she said “All life is about movement”; indulge me to add to this statement today using the words of Ellen Glasgow that “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward”.

Growth is very essential to life and indeed there is a vast difference between growing up and growing old. But that is a talk for another day. There is no vacuum in life, you are either growing or you are deteriorating. First time experiences are sets of events, circumstance, people etc that we encounter for the very first time. It is highly correlated to growth because it has the potential of changing our skills, our capacity, our profiles, our story and even our history. These experiences can transform us from who we used to be to who we eventually become afterwards.

I have watched my daughters grow from babies to infants and to being toddlers and now you may refer to them as children as it were; but the excitement of seeing them take their first step is remarkable, regrettably though I only saw that of my first daughter. And gradually as they grow they feel their way through life. If you observe closely at children growing up, you would notice that almost everything catches their attention, from dropping of spoons, closing of doors, toilet flushing, turning-on the TV to even PHCN holding and releasing the power at will or the mosquitoes that crave for some taste of their unadulterated blood. These events are seemingly new to them and they love to engage in order to understand it better.

New experiences have a way of registering itself in our brain, activating some of our cells making some of our organs to suddenly become conscious of something that they have usually ignored. Learning how to ride a bicycle for instance, improves some of the organs for better balance; it develops some parts of the brain. The same goes for learning how to drive, it will initially secrete several hormones in the body until the body gets used to it and after a while it becomes a routine and almost a reflex action. Speaking for the first time in Toastmasters you bet is indeed a worthwhile experience; one thing I can guarantee you is that, every opportunity you have to speak is a different challenge entirely, all first time experiences.

All these experiences do not leave us the same way; they in fact transform us from who we were into who we eventually become after the process. Indeed a conscious effort to growth can be exhilarating but also rewarding.

As adults in this room I dare to ask, when last did you have a first time experience? When was the last time you met someone for the first time, or take a route for the first time, or deliberately going to a place for the first time? Thanks to toastmasters, we would have the privilege of some of these first time experiences, nevertheless, I challenge you today, to be more deliberate about your first time experiences, go to new places, learn a new dance step, try out a new food, if you can swim, learn how to drive, if you can drive, learn how to sail, go sky-diving, skiing and the likes. The most important thing is that you take deliberate effort in your first time experiences and watch yourself blossom as you grow.
(An award winning Toastmasters Speech)