Detour

I can be indecisive.

OK! Maybe not exactly indecisive because that would make me look bad. I don’t want to look bad. Who wants to look bad anyway?

Let’s say that I am an excessive planner or what they call a perfectionist. I could even be a person who loves things to go in an exact way without deviation. So I take forever to plan every move and counter move before I can settle on a certain course of action. I think that description fits me best.

If I go to a restaurant with you, you’ll probably order your food, eat it, finish, and have the table cleared before I make up my mind.

I’ll take eons to order. Waiters, God bless their souls; have to wait on me for forever before I can place an order. I’ll be wondering whether to take the spicy fries or the regular fries for a whole 15 minutes. Trivial right? I know, I know.

Then, I’ll be thinking, ‘do I take chicken or fish? Should I do soda or tea? Or should I start with soda while taking my meal and take tea later?’ If I decide to go with tea, should it be lemon tea or African tea? Should the African tea be just a cup or the full tea pot? All this while, the waiter will keep coming to confirm whether I have made up my mind and every time, I’ll send her away. Waiters have an insane kind of patience yaani. To be fair, I always leave a good tip. At least I try.

I almost always have more than one sermon that I could preach at any one time. So even after I have prayed and think that sermon ‘a’ works, I’ll still be thinking how sermon ‘b’ is perfect. I could flip between the two for hours or even days before I decide on one. Sometimes I’ll go up the pulpit with no clue which of the two to go with and wait for God to hola at me. I know, He and I are cool like that!

I normally have more than one intro to a story.

Last week, I had three intros and I couldn’t figure out which one to use until the last minute. So I will normally write my intros on different pages. Then I will copy and paste them to the main story and read each of them out loud to hear which one fits. I will do this until I get a good ring to it. I know, I mostly sound like a nutcase.

I consider every tiny bit of a factor before I can make a decision. I want options to a perfect plan. Then I want an option for the option to the best option. I have done it all my life. And part of the reason why I do that is because I really can’t stand failure. I decided that I had failed enough times trying to learn how to walk as a toddler. I don’t want a repeat course as a grown up. I want everything to work out perfectly so I plan, plan and then plan some more. Most times, it works out, others times it doesn’t, but I still do it.

To be honest, most times, I don’t like it, but I have never tried to stop it or change it. It’s one of those things that you do for so long that it becomes part of your modus operandi. So you just live with it. We tend to do that a lot. Pick up habits that we refuse to let go off so they become part of us. Humans are such collectors!

So anyway, last week I got this amazing story!

I say amazing because it threw me off balance. I love stories that do that to me even though I am as planned as a January to December calendar. Maybe it is because ‘off-balance’ is different, I don’t know. Mani’s story drove me to the edges, quite literally. You know that a story has got me when all I can do is listen. You can’t listen to a good story and write at the same time, you’ll miss out on the good stuff. At least I can’t.

So later I wrote this story down from start to finish and read it six times almost. Yes, I also do that. I am an obsessive-compulsive proofreader and please don’t ask me why I am not using grammarly yet. I love to read, re-read, read, re-read, read then finally re-read. After the sixth read, I’ll sit with someone and ask him or her to read the story aloud just to see whether I left anything out.

So the story was done, finally. All I needed to do was decide under which category to post it and that is when the agony and torture began.

I couldn’t figure out whether to post it under the ‘boys & girls’ category or the ‘just life’ one. This story has a bit of both categories in it. It is about a girl and there are boys involved. But it is also generally about life, about love, about faith, about family and about life’s detours. I couldn’t just put it in a box, shut it in there and brand it ‘boys & girls’? No, it was a bit wider than just that one category.

The ‘just life’ stories are generally about life. So I could write about God and I, or I could write about my matatu experience, or how coffee at Java is amazing. Yes I love Java, ebu leave me alone! If your shoes look interesting, like those sharp pointed shoes that preachers wear, I’ll probably write about them. If I am walking in town and something silly happens to me, I’ll write about it. So, yeah, generally, just life, because there’s so much to write about life and so much to learn from the mundaneness of it.

Long story short, I made up my mind a bit too late.

So now, I decided that today, I’ll take a detour. I am going to introduce the ‘just life’ story series. Don’t fret; I’ll mix the stories up. So today I could do a ‘boys & girls’ story and do a ‘just life’ one kesho. Either way, you’ll always have a good read.

If you have any story about life that you want us to write, email me, let’s write that story. Also, keep the ‘boys & girls’ stories coming, I promise to write most of them if not all.

Have a decisive day or whatever is left of it, won’t you?