There is an old Ethiopian proverb that goes: “One cannot feel homesick a place that s/he had never been to.”
Still walking on the streets of Addis, my friend Duni and I were arguing about the interpretation of the proverb. I said, “This might stand in contradiction to mankind’s intrinsic zeal to experience and discover places.”
Traveling and experiencing cultures, places and the like would rather breathe new life into the way we do things. It shines light on to our path of progress. So the proverb could be wrong for we may be homesick to a place that what we had never been to.
After listening to my point, as he was looking the newly growing buildings on right and left sides of the street, we kept on walking, in a way that he did not care about what I would say, Duni looked back to me and started his usual rhetoric.
He started by telling me that it is manly to plan one’s future. But the more the rewarding experiences of the travels is the more dwindling of their obsession about the future.
“These days most people think about the future while their present is being destroyed. Some scientists are even obsessed about going and seeing what the future looks like before they fully understand what the present holds. My question will be; why do you want to go to the future, if you know the future will come to you on its pace. One has to be brave enough to work on her/his present and get ready to welcome the future no matter how it looks like.
“And to me, the only way the future will come to you is when you are doing or living the present in a right way. Some of the people would want to understand this idea but they try to lapping on the soup of the future because they are bored of today. Some of them also want to spit it when they suspect that tomorrow would be the same.
That is because there is something wrong about lapping on the future, and coming back to the present is like crawling backwards to the future they thought they already found with their little test of fantasy. So they will go on lapping on it but they will never find as they are not treating their present properly or for they already forgotten about it or they do not want to see it at all.
“Some of them would choose lapping on their past or yesterday and I do not blame them for I am sure that they have a very good reason to get mad or be stuck on that time. Some regimes have already long gone and there are some old people who would tell you some good stories about that regime which their life got stuck on. That is because, no matter what went wrong during the time they are stuck on, there are some good things they remember and they are worthy of sharing their stories to posterity.
“These days, some taxi drivers may think about the future and ignore the consequences of what they are doing in the future. I observed that the rear glass at the back of their cars which are covered by stickers and posters just to make sure that the traffic police would not see they have extra passengers on the taxi.
But the meaning of having a back window with a glass and a rear-view mirror on the front is to look what is going on in the
front and back of the car, you will have the opportunity to avoid any possible accident. But the drivers I told you about only see the chances to avoid a bad future of having a traffic ticket and profiting a little form their extra passengers they have on board.
They do not want to see the scientific principles of overloading a cab with extra passengers would cause an accident that could claim not only their own but also other innocent peoples’ lives. The passengers who would get on board a crowded cab are also equally responsible for any accident that may occur.
Most of the things that we are learning these days have been inherited from the past scholars, and we are not praising the present ones. The problems of today’s arguments are that you cannot make your point without referring to an old legendary philosopher or scientist that has proven and ongoing theories yet. You cannot talk about physics unless you refer to Albert Einstein or some old mathematician of the western world.
But we need to learn to praise ourselves and the present if we need to have a better future.
The Ethiopian Herald Friday 14 February 2020
BY HENOK TIBEBU
