I know I must have quoted this passage sometimes back when I endeavoured to do 2 blog posts in a month, but I will not mind quoting it again:
“If you do something that turns out wrong, you can almost always put it right, get over it, learn from it or at least deny it. But once you have missed out something, it’s gone. There will be the girl you never got to say the right words to, the band you never got to see live, the winning streak you never got to cheer, the brilliant retiring professor whose class you never took, the relative you never got close to. It is a long list no matter what. Try to keep it as short as possible.” – Gordon Driszchilo
The reason I come back to this post is not because I managed to achieve some lofty feat that I have aspired to or because I got some deep philosophical insight into some thing, rather it is some mundane stuff that I have been upto to. The band I got to see live and the winning streak I got to cheer.
Last Saturday I went to listen to James Ingram. When I was young, sometime in the 80s when all we listened to was one radio station, I heard James Ingram’s “There’s No Easy Way” to break someone’s heart and got fascinated by the song and later his music in general. Those who know me know that I never get excitable by stuff like shows but when I heard James Ingram was coming to Kenya I decided that I must watch one of the musicians I grew up listening and loving. Most of them are now dead (Luther Vandross, Andy Gibb, Michael Jackson, two thirds of the Bee Gees, Whitney Houston et al) and one day I will be old and wondering that I never got to see any of my “idols” perform. I am past that age where one aspires to go to the US or Europe (yes, with old age indeed comes some wisdom), and so I might as well never get the opportunity to see these people who defined my childhood (and yes, teenage romance) live in action. I knew 5k was a bit on the high side but was not going to miss the performance and soon an old romantic and his money were soon parted.
I must say I actually enjoyed the performance and even murmured along in places where I could no longer remember the lyrics.
The other half of this quotation is about the winning streak. For local football lovers, there is only one team that has been putting on the winning streak in the local league. I have done my vocal cords an injustice with the amount of football songs I have been subjecting it to over the weekends (as they say, even old cats drink milk) but one thing is for sure, if we do win the league, I will say I was there. If we don’t do it, well we came close enough and I enjoyed the ride. I have heard the young ones say the slogan nowadays is YOLO (You Only Live Once) and I do like to think of myself as being young at heart. I might not be having the energy (or time) to appear more regularly on the blogs but that is not to say I am not enjoying myself. Go out there and enjoy yourself!!!
