What was compulsory for you at fourteen?
At five in the morning it was still dark, and somebody in our house was already moving. By seven I was out of the gate, because crossing the bustling city of Lagos to get to my secondary school.
I have been thinking about what that city, that school were doing to my body, without anybody mentioning it and without asking my permission. Yours may have been somewhere else entirely, but I suspect it was doing something similar.
We got up before the sun, despite never having read anything about circadian rhythm. It was simply when the day started. We dug the hard ground planting yams in Agric science class. We swept floors, bent over with our traditional brooms. Some of us were "lucky" enough to have an enforced siesta mid afternoon. Others of us carried things, including water, which is the sort of loaded, weight-bearing work that women now pay a trainer forty pounds an hour to supervise.
And the food. Beans, plantain, vegetables, fish, groundnut, okra. High fibre, plant-heavy, almost no added sugar, nothing that came out of a packet with a cartoon on it (apart from maybe Cabin biscuits and Fan ice cream). Meals eaten at regular intervals, in a "time-restricted" pattern with an overnight fast from dinner to the next day's breakfast. Cardiologists write entire books about that pattern now and give it a name and sell it back to us.
None of it was chosen. There was a bell, and the bell decided.
For some of you, the bell was something else. A mother who did not entertain lying in (weekend early morning market trips!!! can I get a witness from my sisters?? Or from my mum, if she's reading this newsletter). A farm in the village. A walk to school in Sheffield in the rain because there was no second car. A father who thought sitting down in the afternoon was a moral failing. Whatever yours was, something or someone used to decide these things for you.
But at forty-seven, there is no bell.
If I do not lift anything heavy today, nobody notices. If I eat toast standing at the kitchen counter at eleven at night because that is the first quiet moment I have had, I don't get into trouble, no one tells me off. Everything that was compulsory for eighteen years growing up now has to be chosen, on a Tuesday, by a tired woman, against the pull of everything else she is holding.
I meet women most weeks who have concluded from this that they now lack discipline. That may have been what I once thought of myself, but not any more.
Your one thing this week
Name the one thing that was compulsory for you as a girl and is now optional.
Just name it. Say it out loud in the car or write it in the back of your diary. When you can point at the specific thing that was arranged for you and no longer is, that story has to change, and you can decide what to do next from somewhere more accurate.
There is a line in Jeremiah about standing at the crossroads and looking, asking for the ancient paths, asking where the good way is, and walking in it. It is one of the few places we are told to go back and find something rather than build something.
Health in your body, peace in your soul, purpose in your step.
Lolu :)
