The Prophecy of the Mountains:

Our Transitioning to a New Dream Ej and Bayo Clement Akomolafe Was it the Chinese that said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? They missed a spot painting wisdom on the canvas of their moral world: journeys often begin with much more than steps. Try disenchantment; theres nothing more certain to give you itchy feet than an itchy heart.

We had that.
We were tired by the time we reached Himachal Pradesh in the now rickety Tata vehicle that faithfully took us from Delhi, through potholes, to the majestic mountains of the Himalayas. But it was more than the long stretch that tired us. Much more. Young, successful in the academic world, PhD candidates with impressive rsums, and just about to get married, we were burdened by the festering reek of the narratives of an increasingly suspicious system a cancerous wound. You see, we were children of the establishment handpicked by our privileged positioning in our respective societies in India and Nigeria, by our grades and eventual selection into the upper echelons of the intellectual elite, by our youth (which served and still serves to amplify our accomplishments), and by the cold and subliminally devious calculations to ascend every subject of a hierarchy exercises handpicked to fill new roles of leadership. We were groomed to be new masters of our respective societies. Like almost every other youth of today, our eyes once glistened with tears as our teachers pronounced the virtues of greatness and enjoined us to embrace the duties of hard work and vision-articulation so that we could live and be remembered. And every night, a new dream, each one more impressive than the previous, tethered itself to our impressionable minds shaping us, conjuring scenes of victory in competition over our classmates, over the scourge of poverty that now grips our world, over the heathen tribes and nations we pitied for being so backward, over ourselves. We were the messiahs and, like any messiah worth his beard or her locks, we swam in a pool of prophecies. Indeed, we carried our prophecies everywhere like an aspirin: our stories of conquest and domination, our struggles to scale the rung of social privilege, wisdom nuggets that reminded us that the problem with the world was them (whoever that referred to), and that all we generally needed to do was to make loads of money, settle down, contribute to society, and live forever.

It could have worked our lives as the establishment would have wanted them but something happened on the way to heaven. It all started to go wrong when we first met each other. I (Bayo) had graduated summa cum laude in Psychology and best in my department and college. I returned to my university, was made Director of a rich funding program in the university, the Secretary of our Alumni Association, and unofficially the go-to nerd of the set. I had a dream to change the world, to find answers to the most riveting questions that plagued human experience, and to stop the mouths of anyone who had a contrary opinion to my well-founded arguments about the human condition. My quixotic search led me through the back alleys of economics, psychology, theology, sociology and a whole host of other ogy-ies (add a smattering of quantum physics articles to that orgy). Of course, I started to sprout new perspectives the most significant of which was consequent upon the fact that my quest for Truth (with a capital T) may have been dealt a terrible blow by the singular observation that there is none; that is, what we call Truth is a story, an ethical performance, and one possibility of the always undetermined mystery we call conveniently call reality. But no experience could have been as seismic, as profound as my meeting with Ej. She came from India to work in my university a few months after I had signed the dotted lines. People whispered about the expatriate beauty with brains. Ej finished top of her class at the Womens Christian College in Chennai, and already had three first-class degrees in Biotechnology related fields when I merely had one. There was always a mystery to her as she seemed to glide to her classes in her saris, oblivious to the haunting stares that could have made her trip on her dress. In time, we would meet, and develop a remarkable relationship. She was the most significant undoing of my internal security for, after learning about her experiences and her multiracial heritage (India, Iran, England, Nigeria), I grew rather confused about which world I had hoped to improve. And so, joined by promise, driven by our shared wounds, a number of fateful turns in our expectations, and our shared confusion and disenchantment, we came to the mountains and left them, three days later, with gifts we shall always covet. It was the gift of play the silent beckon to transgress the factory lines of our humdrum lives, to let go of the need to control and dominate, to live in the thrilling Now and connect with the Present. It was Aspi Shroffs words to me (Ej) as he used a pair of scissors to make a hole bigger than the piece of paper from whence it was cut: You live in a prison house of correctness; you only see the yes or the no. Thats the problem with you schooled people. You dont know the maybe. You two can live a magical life of untold possibilities if only you find the courage.

It was a smooth stone with an orange face painted on it and red dots for eyes given to Bayo by a young child; the stone told a story: it said that the earth is alive, and that if we choose we can re-enchant every rock and tree and creature with the magic of new stories, new myths, new possibilities. It was the prophecies of the mountain: the invitation to a consciousness shift, a transformation of perspectives an invitation to reconsider how our myths of scarcity and alienation had helped create cultural colonisation and consumerism; the call to resist the omni-oppressive tyranny of debt-based money and the easy classifications between poor and rich it perpetuates; the cry to drop our messianic egos and enjoy the beauty of a slow, small life away from the commodification and homogenisation of jobs, degrees, schools, the Gregorian calendar, our financial system, and the exclusivism of religious establishments; and, the freedom to think in more ways than in the old binary of good and evil. Its almost a year since we took that journey of a thousand miles to the mountains. Today, now married, we are downsizing gradually leaving the convenience of independence and reconnecting to the painfulness of interdependence; we are looking forward to losing our jobs, falling off the Yellow Brick Road, and entering into the gift economies of our amazing worlds. Most of the gifts we brought back from the Learning Societies Conference (2011) remain (though Bayo, always the careless one, cannot quite find the stone with the painted face!). None, however, is as precious as the wounds we still bare the wounds on our psyches, our memories, thrust upon us by our very birth into a world gripped by competition, distrust and fading communities. We prayed the mountains to take them away, but they did not. Its a good thing, this. How else do we learn to connect with the people we once called strangers except by these wounds?