Provision

I love to tell stories of how I started university. On the back of my father’s motorcycle. With a box placed on my laps, three pairs of clothes inside. Only less than three thousand naira in my account. And the hope of squatting with a friend I have met only on Facebook.

I used to love the lack in this story. The plainness. The clean arc encircling— “It must be the story of want that gives perspective to my life, hardly wanting for anything now.” This is one of my stories of want I like to tell. And I used to think I loved telling it because it functioned as backstory. A kind of contrast to my present.

All this is not entirely true, at least now. There is a character we seem to unconsciously take with certain types of stories. With the sadness of a family tragedy, one expects a happy story “to balance it out.” The same when you talk about suffering at some point in time, one begins to ponder: “thank God all of that is over now”, or “what did you now do about it?”, or “what lesson did you learn from it?” or “how did you make that leap from there to here” or “how do you intend to make that leap?”, etc. Surely, suffering cannot exist for its own sake. We must assume its use. Similarly when you talk about impoverishment.

Everybody wants to give you a hand. Some eventually do, and they may be shocked to realize they have done neither a good nor a bad thing. And those who go on, looking away, share the guilt of not giving a hand. Suppose the latter have, they would have done neither a good nor a bad thing. Only moved.

This kind of attitude stems from a complex of belief about friendship and responsibility. According to this belief, friendship is often about responsibility. But that responsibility is always the responsibility of and to a specific thing and not to another. Such that friendship begins to hang on how deeply we feel responsible for the friend and the friendship. How much we can give ourselves away in responsibility.

What this does is ignore our own self and the possibility that our help, even when it is offered with the right motive, may be unneeded, maybe even destructive to the friend. That, in any friendship, maybe there should be provision where help is not offered, whether as advice or material, but help as one’s presence. Only our presence. Calls that say: “I see you going through stuff. I am rooting for you.” Messages that say: “Happy birthday, my love” without any gift.

I love to tell stories about myself. A lot. A half of them includes stories of lack, partly because lack is half of my life. Were it to be a story of provision, I would still be telling it just as vigorously. So it cannot be the lack or the provision in my stories. Stories hardly need help, but presence, first. Attentiveness. Which is the only good help we can offer it.