The Paradox Of Happiness.

I thought I wanted to spend all the time merely sleeping and watching movies. Little did I know that I would soon get fed up with it.

Author: Utuje Bénie

It is fascinating how small changes about the way we think and do things can make a big difference in our lives. I did not know that, until I had abundant free time to use as I please.

Before lockdown

Everyone seemed to think that there was something special about 2020. For me things were crazy. It would be my last year in high school.

It started out as any other year, with New Year’s party and everyone going back to their normal lives after a couple of days.

Parents went back to work trying to make ends meet as usual and some of us, (children precisely me and my small sister) went boarding.

When I reached school, senior six turned out to be far harder than I thought but do not get fooled, that did not keep me from dozing in class. I guess it would be appropriate to say that I am a lazy student.

Now that I think of it, I am the one who made things tougher than they should be by not doing my duties on time.

One morning a friend of mine told me about a virus originating in China that was spreading ridiculously fast and that it was killing millions of people.

I was sad about all the dying people, but though I hate to admit it, I was not that worried most probably because it had not reached our country yet.

The following days things became serious, the government announced a lockdown and they sent us home the following day.

During lockdown

When my small sister and I reached home, both dad and mom were glad that we were finally going to spend some quality time together as a family.

Our big brother was home too and reckless enough, our big sister had already broken the no-going- out rule.

During our first days at home, everyone seemed in high spirits and excited to spend so much time doing what they liked, which in my case was sleeping and watching movies.

Little did we know that we would soon get fed up.

Our parents and us tended to get on each other’s nerves quite often but as days passed, we got along much better or maybe they just found us so incorrigible that they quit trying to make us better. Who knows?

However, they made a strict timetable for prayers and sports. We were cool with praying but we detested sports. I personally thought that it posed a threat to my femininity because the society I live in does not consider abs and muscles a girl thing.

It is very ridiculous how sometimes we place more value on what people think than what is best for us.

Our parents became super nice to us by not checking if we were cleaning the house or revising our notes. They just did their work and enjoyed spending time together and reading the Bible.

I engaged in a very bad and destructive, for the lack of a better word, habit of oversleeping and watching movies all day.

It is not like I had nothing else to do, I certainly had a lot of material to revise since I needed to pass the national exams, but it is just that my head had completely refused to receive anything related to my studies.

At least that’s what I thought before.

To make matters worse, my brain decided that it would be fun to remind me that I was being useless whenever I started to have a good time.

If the truth be said, doing nothing is really awful. It drains you physically, mentally, and even emotionally. My self-esteem went low, although I did not realize it until a few weeks ago. I started to feel weak and physically ill, I lost interest in almost everything, I became highly irritable, and I was always in a bad mood.

Most of the times I felt bored and sad that even chatting with my friends and watching funny memes posted by some of our friends who don’t bother trying to act mature to impress people couldn’t keep me happy for a long time.

I did not know that my brother likes to listen to the radio, much less news, but it turns out that he is really into it these days.

He made it his personal responsibility to update us on the death toll and the number of infected people every time we were going to have supper.

It used to freak me out but I don’t know where it went as everything else and it did leave me feeling more than a little bit guilty.

At my brother’s school, they teach them online and give them assignments, which he, as most of the students, used to do on exactly the submission date.

His behavior made him more stressed than he could have been if he did them on time.

I always secretly thought that he was lazier than me and that he couldn’t care less if he wasn’t doing his work on time, so imagine my surprise when all of a sudden he started taking his lessons seriously and took time to revise on his own every day.

Making change

After some serious thinking on my part about how I was using my time, I decided that I needed to learn from my brother and make some changes. I started by;

• Changing the time I took a bath

• Sleeping early

• Waking up early

• Taking time to revise and do sports every morning and you can’t imagine how everything else changed even the way I felt about things.

I thought I wanted to spend all the time merely sleeping, watching movies, chatting with my friends but I found sheer joy and satisfaction in doing my responsibilities on time and knowing that I can do something useful without someone telling me to.

I definitely still enjoy the fact that I am not bossed around every minute by someone, not having to check my watch every two minutes to see if it’s not yet time for the teacher to get out, and not caring about the weather.

But it doesn’t mean that I no longer have responsibilities to do.

My days are happier, I am satisfied by doing things as I planned and being creative.

And most of all I literally enjoy the things that used to bother me like mom insisting that we take pictures every Saturday after praying in order to keep those good memories in her phone.