My friend the Datsun-Toyota.

A dear friend was recently going through a difficult time. The kind where one minute you want to scream at the top of your lungs, the next you want to pull out your hair or/and break something. Yet at the end of it all, you just end up all curled up feeling helpless. Now, she’s the kind of person who’s used to being in control all the time, so such situations are generally very frustrating for her. As she was recounting her ordeal-as she chooses to call it- to me she broke into some strange analogy. Apparently she felt like one of those old Datsun-Toyota cars (I’m not sure where they manufacture those). This kind of car, as fate would have it, was used to transport nyanyas from shagz to Nairobi. It is extremely old and creaks all the way. It’s all rusty and comes in the shade of blue they paint doors in; you know that weird shade that’s neither luminous nor sky blue. It’s like green but not green (the things stress does to our tranquillity). I didn’t quite get it but it wasn’t about me getting it. So this car that she felt like, had run out of mileage and now, she, needed to go to the workshop. She-the car- wanted to be taken apart. She wanted to be totally dismantled, for each and every part to be taken out, cleaned to newness, oiled and put back together. While she was at it, she wanted to change the funny blue bodywork to a screeching shade of yellow. On leaving the workshop she was going take her now screeching yellow Datsun-Toyota self to the Concours where she would win the car of the year award. I did not mean to laugh at her predicament but I just had to.
When you think about it though, we all have that moment where no matter how much of a control freak you are, you just want to hand over the reins to someone else. The hustles of life become too much and you are consumed by a need to de-clutter. You get all consumed by a desire to take out everything that seems to be clouding your life on whatever level and remain with just the bare minimum. Like spring cleaning. Like my friend put it you want to get back to the workshop where you were assembled. You want to be taken apart, cleaned out and put back together minus all those things that were choking you up. The workshop could mean just about anything depending on who you ask. It could mean taking a holiday away from your everyday life, renewing your faith, talking to a friend who seems to have all the answers, communing with nature, it all depends on the person. Either way we all need to take sometime off and de-clutter once in a while if we are to always be at our optimum. So before you start calling yourself a beat-up Datsun- Toyota, take sometime and rejuvenate your soul.