It’s been 4 whole weeks since my last newsletter and it feels like it has been longer. Life has been zooming along and I haven’t had the time or brain space to write as usual. Having broken my streak by not publishing two weeks ago, I decided to reduce my chances of falling off completely by showing up to ramble write something today.
It was my birthday on the 31st of August and I got to celebrate with my friends all weekend. It took me a while to decide on a budget-friendly way to celebrate so I was really honoured that my friends showed up even with less than 2 weeks’ notice. There was plenty of food and drink and lots of merriment. I truly felt surrounded by love.
I’m always super chuffed when I introduce my different friend groups and everyone just hits it off. As I’m writing this, it just occurred to me that this is likely the result of having friends who are all doctors with similar values.
values - principles or standards of behaviour; one's judgement of what is important in life.
The subject of values/principles is one that has come up a lot recently in the State-of-the-nation conversations I sometimes have with my sister. Following the events of 20-10-2020, I changed my name on Twitter to “Ex-Nigerian” and have since tried my best to ignore news about Nigeria as much as I can. However, as I have refused to leave the internet I am still privy to a lot of Nigerian happenings and it is becoming more apparent how much of our issues as a nation stem from a lack of values/ valuing money above all else.
Every day on the internet, there is one story or the other about some wrongdoing/ criminal activity by Nigerians and in the comments there are always other Nigerians making excuses for the perpetrators. One very common excuse is poverty. People seem to imply that when you’re poor, it is reasonable to steal/kill/defraud others because as long as the end (getting money) is justified, the means doesn’t matter.
This lack of values shows up in various aspects of our lives as Nigerians, and from a very early age too. I was all of 9 years old when I learnt that some parents paid for special centres for their children to sit the National Common Entrance in order to ensure they got good grades. Imagine learning at 9 years old that you can bypass the system and get whatever you want by paying off the right people.
We generally adopt most of our early values from our families and the people around us and these values can be positive or negative. Unfortunately, not everyone grows up witnessing positive values and may not even realise there is anything wrong with the negative values they’ve grown up with because that is all that they know. As adults though, we have the ability and consciousness to choose and develop our value systems as we go through life.
As I continue to navigate life, I’m learning the importance of having personal values and how much impact our values have on our relationships and day-to-day living. Having your own clear personal code helps when faced with challenges. For example, if honesty is a core value for you, it’s much easier to identify any situation that might compromise this value and stay away. If on the other hand your values are not as clear, you might find yourself in many uncomfortable and even compromising situations where you end up going along with things you may not agree with.
Our values also play a major role in our personal and professional lives. Again, using honesty as an example, a person who values honesty might be miserable in a job that requires them to be dishonest, while a person who is comfortable telling lies would probably thrive in such a role. Likewise in our personal relationships, a friendship between an honest person and a dishonest person is likely to have more friction than that between two honest or two dishonest people. Even in romantic relationships, imagine building a life with someone with different values around finances or raising children.
When we find ourselves in these misaligned situations, it is much easier for the positive values to be eroded. One small act of dishonesty goes unpunished and suddenly it doesn’t feel like such a big deal to be dishonest.
I’m now more conscious of choosing people whose values align with mine and it has made my life so much easier. It’s not like I go around asking people what their values are because that would be quite awkward, but it is quite easy to suss what people consider important if you pay attention. The problem is that we don’t always consider things like values to be important, and we don’t pay enough attention.
I do not have much hope that things will change for the better in my home country, but I hope that this gets you thinking about your own values, what they are, how you uphold them and if they are reflected in your relationships and the people you choose to surround yourself with.
This week I am reading
Don't You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane - One of my Instagram friends shared this book recently and it happened to be available in my library so I started it straight away and I was not disappointed. I am struggling to articulate my thoughts about this book but I’ll just say that reading it felt like going on an adventure with words. McFarlane reminded me that storytelling is an art. The way she used her words to tell this story of love lost and found and how seemingly small acts of sexual assault can have lifelong impact was absolutely brilliant, in my opinion. I also liked how she wielded that dry British wit and humour. I’m officially a fan of her writing and can’t wait to read more from her.
This week I am listening to
The Ikigai episode of our little podcast that can. We had a friend of the pod on this episode where we talked about purpose, what it means to us and how we feel about having a purpose, or not. Please listen and feel free to write us - getloudpod.ng@gmail.com.
I can’t believe we are almost at the end of September. The days are getting colder and shorter and I am not looking forward to them getting even colder and shorter. I need to come up with a plan to beat the winter blues this year.
I hope life is treating you well. Here’s wishing you a week of living in alignment with your values.
Chioma.