Two lives, kill a true life

Your Dual Life can Kill Your True Life

Paul Mashauri, Masaki, Dar es Salaam, 14th September, 2015

In our society there are things you can not do because those things are considered part of immorality. Those things are the things  you are supposed to keep to yourself and no one is supposed  to hear, see or witness. It doesn’t matter how painful it is, it doesn’t matter how much you have to pay to live with, as long as you are living, keep it with you.

No wonder you may be asking yourself what is it that this guy is talking about? it’s so easy my friend, may be you haven’t  heard of the term ‘dual life’ but all said above defines the two lives most of us have to live in order to please the people who matter in our lives. For the past five years, I have been sharing my personal experiences and that of the people I meet in Facebook just to provoke thinking and stimulate social discussion on issues and matters we face everyday in our daily lives. I remember in one of my status, I spoke about being honest in life either in a relationship, in your own career, in your marriage or in what you believe in. I asked a question, how would you feel being told by your husband or your wife that I do no longer love you and that the affection have gone away? what do you think! obviously that is the very tough piece of information to digest.

Having posted this on my wall made me receive a lot  of comments in my inbox. A lot  of my friends opened up to me in reaction to what I wrote on my wall most of whom trying to explain how they have been surviving in a relationship that is no longer working, a relationship in which the love has gone away but just because the relatives and friends can not understand if they break their long standing relationships which looks promising and lucrative outside then they must keep it. Some shared their inner most feelings complaining how much they have to cry everyday to keep the marriage in-order to keep the kids they love dearly having known in their mind the consequences of divorce and the sufferings the children would have gone through once the two couples part away. These are the very emotional feelings of the people who are selfless  enough to think beyond their own happiness and pleasures because of the innocent kids who did nothing to be part of the family through which someone is experiencing emotional pain. As a father and someone who has been in marriage for more than six years I could understand how it feels and what it means to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the children.

This and many other stories of the same poses to us a million dollar question. At what stage of life should someone be aggressive enough to forgo everything else in order to live his own life? this is a very difficult question and it means different things to different people. It’s a question that someone can not just wake up and respond promptly. It depends so much on one’s set of values, experience, faith, personality  and more importantly one’s spiritual foundations. However for the sake of this discussion, let us consider a situation when it is too unhealthy to keep living a lie for the sake of maintaining  societal order or norms and customs.

One day I was having dinner with my Pastor and I asked him the same question. I said Pastor, in the bible it is written do not break the marriage, because a marriage that established on earth by God is at the same time established in the Kingdom of God. He said yes because marriage is more than a contract, it’s a covenant. However there are ‘misconceptions’  on the same because not all marriages that are established in our churches are established by God. Looking at the bigger picture a marriage established by God is’t defined  by an act of a wedding. It’s how the entire process has been undertaken. He further gave me the story of his sister. He said  his lovely sister was married to the so called ‘successful man’. Despite their material accomplishment, his sister lived a terrible life. His husband mistreated  her for long and she became weak day by day. The relatives and friends realised that she was happily unmarried  in an unhealthy relationship but because of her worries and fears she decided to face the physical  and psychological abuse on her own . At the end she passed away and that was the most devastating moment in the family. He said.

Unhealthy situations are not necessarily found in relationships. It may be in your career, your business or your personal life. I once met a friend of mine by the name of Joseph who is running  a hotel business in Santon South Africa. It was more than  two years  that we didn’t meet and that day we met at Trinity Pub where I went with my friends for dinner. Joseph moved to South Africa with his family to open up a new business after many years of experience  running hotel chains in Tanzania. He is such an intelligent and funny guy. I asked him. Joseph why did you move to South Africa, I guess you were doing so well in Dar es Salaam. He laughed then replied “ That was what you thought Paul but the truth of the matter is I could not even break even in my business. The costs of running the business was so high and the margins were low because of so many factors including lack of faithful employees”  Joseph went father and  said to me that many people when they see a particular business running, their first assumption is that these guys are making a lot of money but that is not always the case. A lot  of entrepreneurs may be surviving in your town for something else but not necessarily the business  you all know that you admire and eager to learn from.

As an entrepreneur I understood what Joseph was saying. It goes back to the dual life. Living a true life that is real and true to you but at the same time living another life to conform with what others expect from you. As I said before this is not an easy discussion because there are so many reasons  to why people do what they do. And sometimes doing so is what makes them survive. But thinking a louder comes another question. For how long should we live a lie? and how sustainable is that?

In my life I came to realise that being honest with yourself gives you a lot of freedom, inner peace and happiness. Saying No to the things you can not do and expressing your feelings without hesitation leaves you with freedom and peace of mind. I am one of the people who grew up avoiding to say No. I could not say no not because I was a lier but because I never wanted to make  people feel bad. Even in situations where I could not see myself with anything to help, I could at first place say Yes then figure out how to go about helping the same. But one thing I overlooked in my  good intent was the factual truth that by not being realistic I was creating troubles for myself by building unfulfilled expectations. Overtime I realised that I was building unnecessary pressure, stress and tension on my side for the things I could avoid by being honest and realistic. I learned that people were being hurt more by not fulfilling my promises  than by saying No. Since then I decided to change that habit. I started training myself to say No to the things I was not sure about delivering the commitment  and Yes to the things I was sure of. Since then I have been enjoying, restoring  and maintaining my relationships even with those whom I was bold enough to say No.

What is is that you should say No in your life today?. What is it that which gives you tension and stress?. What is it that you must keep in order to make other people happy. Ask yourself  what is it that you are going to lose if you decide to say No or what is it that is bigger than your own happiness, your own peace of mind and or your own life that you must keep to impress the world? The funny part of life is that there is nothing than derivative happiness. It’s okay to lose part of you to make others happy for we survive in a give and take relationship but that should not kill your soul and the fun of your life. There is a limit to everything in life and at a particular  point in life one must be bold enough to say No, I must live my life, I must be true to myself and I must  live to please my God not a human being.

Living a fake life is never sustainable. History shows that great men and women with immense power who lived a lie in their world of business and leadership had a bad ending. It doesn’t worth anything to show everyone else that life is beautiful while there is fire burning inside. It doesn’t mean that we have to quit what we don’t like or what makes us feel unhappy, it doesn’t mean that we have to avoid fire. Not at all, sometimes  we have to go through fire to become more stronger, what is important is not to lie to yourself that there is no fire while you know deep inside your heart that there is fire burning. You must recognise the fact that you are going  through fire and do something about it. As you are reading this article I want you to take time and look deeper within you and imagine what is it that you have been living with that you want to say No. Sometimes it is difficult to say no in your own capacity. It may be an addiction  that is deeply rooted in your  spirit. But there is a way, turn back to God and pray. What is impossible before men is possible before His Almighty God. They say life is like a coin, you use it once and it’s gone. Life your life  and write  your own story. No matter how poor, how terrible it is, it is your life and nobody is born to help you living. You were born alone and you will pass over alone. It’s about you and you alone. People can encourage and inspire  you, people can discourage and criticise you, but at the end of the day it’s you, to decide what is good before you and before your creator.