Monday 29 April 2013

Thought Picnic: How Much Time Do I Have?


Preparations undone
Almost four years ago, the answer I got was five weeks if it came to the worst that is if the drugs don’t work, else I would have the chance of a good recovery – I did.
However, the question still lingers in the mind and every new result that shows slow but steady progress belies a sense of vulnerability I do well to try and ignore.
Many times, I wonder if I have set things right, I have an idea of where I want to rest but I have not laid out the plans to any detail as to if I will get that wish fulfilled.
Uncertainty needing clarity
It is morbid with all the foreboding that comes with it, but they are thoughts one should entertain just to be sure that what needs to be done gets done and the many other things might well be left unfulfilled - plan, purpose and prioritise seems to be the guiding focus.
In a call this morning, it appears more tests are required, nothing conclusive but enough for me to review, reassess, understand and appreciate that every breath I take, I die a little and at the same time like I have said many times before, if you have life, live it and live it well – until that time when you are no more living, live.
In a few weeks it would be clearer what the situation is, whether there is much to fear to which I mostly respond with a determination not to be overwhelmed and what the prognosis might be in terms of options, choices, decisions and acceptances.
Denial is not a safe haven
Acceptances indeed, I find myself just about to scale the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model again, I have been in denial many times before, never been overcome with the rage of anger, I have bargained but the professionals could not diagnose depression even when all events presented a perfect storm for it, however at the point of acceptance, I was ready to move on with my life – whatever time is left of it.
Knowledge matters and hopefully they will know enough to inform me when I ask the strange and difficult questions – I’ve been there before though I do not know if I have learnt enough to have the strength to face this as I did before – time will tell.
Let’s live
If anything, I keep doing what I know to do, taking each day as it comes, dreaming the dreams of the wonder of man, hoping beyond hope that the uncomfortable will pass and sharing as much as I can dare – maybe it might help others.
There have been pains, I have learnt to live with them, sometimes I ignore their inconvenience for the prospect of getting on – when the truth is manifest, we shall know as we are and wherefore one might dare to peer into an uncertain future – How much time do I have? If we knew, ill or well, we would have lost the very essence of our humanity.
We must live like there is no tomorrow to fulfil what we must today and live like there are tomorrows of endless time that we do not rush to conclusions that require time to understand better.

Sunday 28 April 2013

Thought Picnic: Hard Times


The business
A family having dinner, the banquet set before them as they expressed a unity and a togetherness rarely seen, the tradition of seating together for meals.
Then with determination and purpose, they find commonality and join in a great enterprise, one that we too easily take for granted, they are friends, loyal and true, meeting at the same time in the same place to dream.
There was an opportunity that presented itself each time that I was unable to realise, to invest in their enterprise that could make a whole world of difference to many, but for the means, too meagre to stretch.
The times
All with bags filled to the brim in front of businesses that define the city, they could be taken for you and I, but they are not, they are in sleeping bags, with no shelter and have become the sign of the times.
I can see them because I have been there, when illness struck, I lost everything but friends who ensured that I did not go without shelter, food and sustenance; it was hard.
Then we assume the system is there help such people, but the one-size-fits-all package rarely fits all, it is a net with holes so large it is surprising it holds anything. The exception these people once represented in the images we once had of the homeless has changed to become a new rule - the people are well-dressed, they are families, they are clean and all they have is there in bags and suitcases, on the street.
The rut
They all have their stories that could make a trail of misfortune to the ends of the earth – unemployment, illness, divorce, debt or just pure luck – none would have deliberately charted the course of their lives to what things have become, it is called life and people live it.
I know the decisions I could not take, choices I could not make, places I could not go, ideas I could not have, opportunities that escaped me, responsibilities I could not assume, I was stuck in a rut, and it looked like there was no end to this rampaging storm.
It is never easy, there is no stop button, but if our society must have a heart that feels and the conscience to perceive, then it is duty-bound to rethink the way hard times affects people and puts them out on the streets.
The thought
As our leaders find political capital to assail the poor defining them as lazy and scrounging, we must be careful not to be fed the wrong image of realities that are so readily oblivious to us. Much that we are quick to see but fail to observe is our preoccupation with the things that concern us taking us away from appreciating what the other is going through.
I do not know the solutions to many of these problems that tug at my heartstrings, but it is not beyond the realm of human ingenuity and the extents of our humanity to find ways to ensure that sleeping bags are mainly used on camping sites under tents for leisure – homes matter to all.
Amidst all the wealth and profligacy that surrounds us, much of which we revel in; there must be means to ensure that hard times do not hit people so hard that there seems to be no other option at all.

Thursday 25 April 2013

Opinion: The Challenge of Rearing Nigerian Children Abroad

An embarrassment of heritage
I was rather discomfited by the news of the conviction of 8 teenagers yesterday for the killing of another teenager in 2010.
There are issues with gang warfare and disputes in London but the brazenness with which these youngsters carried out their assault on another in plain public view leaves one wondering what our society has become.
One teenager stood in the middle of the road wielding a samurai sword and they ended up chasing the victim into a busy London Underground Station where they as many as 15 in number attacked, stabbed, kicked and punched the poor 15-year old Sofyen Belamouadden to death.
That is bad enough, but when I read the names of the perpetrators involved, I feel a sense of eerie familiarity as Junior Bayode, Obi Nwokeh, Christopher Omoregie, Samsom  Odegbune, Femi Oderinwale and Victoria Osoteku all appear to have Nigerian surnames.
They have some Nigerian connection
That is not to say that these people are Nigerian, but one can safely assume they have some connection with Nigeria by reason of parentage and possibly heritage.
The other two might well have Nigerian connections but that is not evident from their names. What bothers me is what the parents and guardians of these kids might have been up to that their wards have ended up on the extreme side of the law having congregated with impunity in the mob act of killing someone else in plain view.
I appreciate that these kids might never have visited Nigeria or experienced what many might call a traditional Nigerian upbringing that gives the parent licence to brutalise their wards in what we broadly call discipline but discipline in and of itself cannot just be corporal punishment – we need to adapt the tools of affirmation and chastisement to the societies we find ourselves in.
Adapting parenting influence
Whereas in Nigeria it is probably enough to dispatch parental responsibility by just being a provider of shelter, food, education and basic welfare, the differences in societal values and expectations mean that parents have to be more involved in attending to the emotional needs of their wards and this is something many might not have found examples of in their own upbringing.
I dare say, where ethnic minorities fail to integrate congregating in conurbations of ghettoised indifference, they shirk in the fundamental responsibility of understanding the pressures their wards face and the society in which they wards are growing – religion and social events amongst ourselves are not enough, we cannot recreate our local villages abroad and hope that it will suffice – it does not.
Just because we cannot bring our kids up the “Nigerian” way does not absolve us of our responsibility in society to bring our kids to respect the rule of law, the dignity of labour and the earning of respect through purposeful activity rather than menace – gangs are fundamentally antithetical to this thinking and one can say it arises because parents are absent from what they are supposed to be doing.
Misguided parental goals
Over the last few years, I have found too many instances where kids of Nigerian heritage have been victims or perpetrators of violent crime, if we must have children in foreign societies it behoves us to exert ourselves to bring them up in environments where they are first not under threat and then not influenced by negative role models.
The preoccupation with keeping up appearances and status in our marooned Diaspora communities when the greater task of separation and integration is of essence for the sake of our children is atrocious – children are better inspired and encouraged by aspirational guardians who provide positive role models that their wards can emulate.
A parenting challenge
It is all too easy to suggest children have become wayward and are the black sheep of the family but if their formative years were spent under a responsible adult’s care and hopefully guidance, then that is probably where things also went wrong – what children end up becoming does not occur in a vacuum.
Looking at those 6 Nigerian names, should be a warning shot across the bows of ethnic parenthood in foreign lands that your involvement is pertinent, that the game plan for child rearing cannot follow the script we once had or experienced back at home and that we cannot spend all hours in the pursuit of filthy lucre if we want the peace of children who will in future go on to live successful, independent lives away from unsavoury encounters with the law and the shame that it brings.

Monday 22 April 2013

Nigeria: How We Sacrifice Our Children to Paedophiles


Our Child Sexual Abuse Shame
It made my blood boil when I first read snippets of this story in Chxta’s Daily Dispatches, the case of a 7-year old girl who was repeated sexually abused by grown men that the magistrate found it just to release one of the paedophile rapists on bail whilst committing the girl to remand in a Child Correctional Centre. [Full Story]
There is no doubt that we find the issue of child sexual abuse difficult to understand or manage in Nigeria, it is there, children suffer but find no avenue, forum or platform to ask for protection and ultimately justice.
Community Spirit and Commodifying Assault
It is so disheartening to read of the ordeal and terror the 7-year old girl went through from grooming, inducements and threats to her life that the paedophile made it routine to seek sexual pleasures of the poor innocent child as her guardians strove to make ends meet as well as care for the child.
Our community spirit implicitly expects that amongst adults, a child is safe and will be free from abuse whilst any responsible adult in that setting rises to the occasion if need be to protect or extract the vulnerable from untenable situations.
However, when it comes to sexual abuse, everyone seems to clam up, no one wants to countenance the idea that some respectable member of the community has crossed the line to the utterly reprehensible that they all close ranks and the victim is left to suffer from the pall of shame and silence that has enveloped the community.
What Law Allows This?
The girl gave such a gruesome tale of the many times the rotten men took advantage of her and her guardians might well have been derelict in their responsibilities of care, love, attention and protection but to then send the girl to a Child Correction Centre really smacks of the lowest form of apathy that should only belong to fiction.
The  Magistrate, Mrs E. B. Daudu of Ikeja Magistrate Court, does not have to be a mother to be aware of what this child has suffered but if there is any law or recommendation for justice that has informed her of this heinously contemptible decision, it must be expunged from our legal tomes with immediate effect for our humanity first and then for the sake of basic civilisation.
Only a Barbarous community with a primitive mindset redolent of primates of the jungle will see any inkling of justice in freeing the criminal and incarcerating the victim, a child at that.
Our Duty to Childhood Failing
What could she have done wrong to deserve such a double denial of justice, fairness, respite and at worst motherly concern that her attackers have gotten off lightly and she is condemned to institutionalised care? A correctional facility at that as if her crime is to be a vulnerable child who has had the misfortune of being born in Nigeria.
The child should be able to roam free and develop without being fearful of abuse or assault. Whilst guardians do have responsibilities, children cannot be held on leash like dogs though it also means sexual predators be kept off the streets.
We Need New Thinking
With this case, the sexual predators will only seek another to abuse and when done, probably murder the victim to prevent being exposed as they were with this particular issue – this must be unacceptable to every well-meaning Nigerian.
It would be easy to advocate kicking Mrs E. B. Daudu off the bench, excoriating the police and child protection agencies with unspeakable vitriol and lynching the miscreants mercilessly but what we need is a change in thinking in our communities, we must not tolerate, condone or excuse paedophilia making the culprits pay a hefty price and giving the victims all the consideration, empathy and support required to heal them of those rotten experiences they lived through.

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Thought Picnic: Somewhat slow getting to tiptop shape


Easy does it
I slowly put myself into recovery mode by not exerting myself too much, anything that will labour my breath, my thinking or my situation I have attempted to avoid to devote the reserves of strength I have to getting well quickly.
Obviously, with my serious loss of appetite there were no reserves of energy to do extraordinary things, letting the fresh air in, I have kept in my hotel room, keeping warm and drinking Earl Grey tea by the gallon – I like my tea.
I have taken on no new activities even though there are some things that need tending to, I have just stuck to the routines of work and rest for maximum benefit – contributing to Twitter without being too combative, having telephone conversations in the most demure manner even when I have been so greatly irritated and avoiding the frustrations that accompany emails from people who should be doing what I repeatedly have to get them to do, again and again – I am taking my time.
New hands on me
My hospital check-ups are round the corner but with all that was going on, I could not muster the strength for travel to the Netherlands but as my pills were running out and I could not get the unprogressive Boots’ Chemist pharmacist to read my foreign prescription, I arranged to visit the local hospital this morning to chat about my situation.
The synopsis of my story had already made them eager to engage and help, somehow, I represented one of those rare cases of people who have done the whole nine yards and more regimens of radical medical intervention much of which they had mostly read from textbooks or heard of from historical recounts but never experienced.
I was ushered in nicely, introduced, registered and then called into the doctor’s office where I related my entire medical history without skipping on all the medical terms and the apothecary concoctions that have found sojourn through my body over the last four years.
Pages of notes later along with reading through my medical transcript, we decided on a battery of tests and checks, swabs, fluids and the 7 vials of blood followed with an appointment for three weeks hence and not forgetting a month’s supply of pills.
I’m feeling cold again
I returned to the hotel to work at pace rather than the office especially after the amount of blood I had given. The decision remains mine if I want to move my treatment regimen completely back to the UK and avail myself of additional services to help people with my medical history cope with a whole myriad of issues.
My appetite is still far from back to normal, I could only manage a fruit salad and though my temperature read 35.9 Celsius this morning taken from my ear, I seem to be running a higher temperature already that I have asked for another blanket as I seek the miracle healing benefits of sleep to give me strength for tomorrow.

Monday 15 April 2013

Thought Picnic: That vulnerable sight of myself

Was and now
Sometimes, I have that strength that beyond reason of what I have lived and experienced is almost impossible to fathom.
My stride is determined, my appearance is probably debonair and my voice conveys authority and awareness of who I am and what I believe.
However, I am in many cases a little man, great affliction draws resources of power, faith and hope; I just believe I will not go under.
Gifts I hate
Then, something seemingly ordinary, an irritation in the throat, a cough and a cold follow like a caboose of the three unwise men of the Orient bearing gifts of tiredness, lethargy and weakness – my gait slows, my strides shorten, my voice fades, my speech cannot keep up with my thoughts and basically I am ill.
My mind works strenuously giving my spirit verve that I need to shake it off to return to my normal self but for all the willingness of the spirit, the flesh revels in weakness tardy at doing what I will to do.
I become a feeble shade of myself, my visage attaining legendary pallor with colour draining away that from afar they know that things are not so right.
Sleep to rise
One can still put up a show but a feeble “I” is not the most comfortable sight if you have aforetime known who I am.
I wish to just fall asleep and wake up rejuvenated but this condition sometimes comes with restlessness that puts sleep out of reach – I have sworn to myself never to succumb to drug-induced sleep.
Maybe some soft classical music and sweet thoughts of inner strength that revives will just be the tonic – I just hate being a very vulnerable sight of myself.

Saturday 13 April 2013

Opinion: Homosexuality and the confusion of beliefs in a secular setting


The duty of the state to children
Two cases of Christianity running into conflict with homosexuality in the courts bring to the fore the need for people with devout beliefs to understand the extents to which they by law will be allowed to influence debate in a broader secular society.
Both cases had to do with access to children and more pertinently access to the children’s minds in terms of fostering and teaching.
Good parents, indeed
There is no doubt that Mr and Mrs Johns, aged 65 and 62 respectively have been good foster parents having fostered 15 children with four grown children and grandchildren of their own, they deserve credit.
However, whilst they have license as parents to bring up their own children in the way they see fit, right, with love, with care and all the religious control they might have to bear on the impressionable minds of their own children – foster care involves the state.
The state is by and large secular, recognising people of diverse backgrounds, beliefs and persuasions whilst protecting the rights of both majority and minority to operate with civility towards each other in the public space.
The changing society
It behoves the state not to place children in view of extant rights and protections in the parental care of people who might trammel the open-minded broader view of the world a child will have when interacting with society and this where fundamentalist religious beliefs and broader secularist thinking conflicts.
The state is not denying the Johns’ the right to believe whatever doctrines they adhere to, that is a right they exercise with full prerogative, but where the state feels that parental care under fostering guidelines will expose a child to teachings that will narrow a child’s outlook good as they might seem, the state must act in the interests of the child and protect that child from influences that could put it at some disadvantage when the child decides to express itself in a wider community.
The headline does suggests Christian beliefs lose out to gay rights [Daily Mail], but the broader issue is beyond that catchy title, the secular state must give all beliefs equality before the law and perform the balancing act of preventing the undue influence of those who have beliefs over those who believe differently or have no persuasion whatsoever to believe either way.
Don’t confuse entitlement with freedom of expression
The second case concerns Robert Haye [Pink Paper], a secondary school teacher in South London who as a Seventh-Day Adventist expressed reprehensible views about homosexuality before a class of students aged 15-16 and in another class of pupils aged 13-14 suggested those who worship on a Sunday are worshipping the devil.
Mr Haye is quite entitled to his beliefs and he is free to share them with anyone who is an adult, a free moral agent with the right, opportunity and mien to challenge such assertions if they deem fit.
However, when children are in a school, they are wards of the state that dictates a curriculum and programme of education that prepares the children for the world they live in.
Forgetting responsibilities
Mr Haye as a teacher is in a position of authority and influence, it means he has a responsibility to understand that his class is not an extension of the temple wherein he worships, he is paid to educate guided by a syllabus and not to fulminate contemning those who have a difference of opinion or beliefs from his own.
The children in his class will come from varied backgrounds many of which Mr Haye might find antithetical to his belief system but the state cannot allow a situation where a child is made to feel inferior for any reason in a school environment – the issue here again is not about Mr Haye’s rights to have his beliefs but about understanding his responsibilities in a secular setting under the employ of the state with access to influence children.
The society is diverse
That is where Mr Haye was lacking in perception and judgement; that he was relieved of his commission as a teacher was a just consequence and his lament that his career has been destroyed is a situation of his own making – it should not be blamed on Christianity or the abrading his rights to believe whatever he does but on the fact that he was lacking in judgement when he expressed those views in the wrong setting and before the wrong audience.
The judge was unequivocal in his assessment of the matter in saying, “This case is not about the right of a teacher to hold sincerely-held beliefs based on the Bible in relation to homosexuality or attendance at church on Sundays. It has been about how those beliefs and views are manifested in the context of teaching in schools with young people with diverse sexuality, backgrounds and beliefs.
He could not do it
No one was asking Mr Haye to recant his beliefs, what the state was asking of him was if he is to be placed before young people as an employee of the state to teach, he should keep to the script. Where he has opinions on a subject outside that remit he must be conversant of the fact that the young people before him, are from such diverse backgrounds that his views must be all-encompassing for inclusiveness not for division and discrimination.
If Mr Haye cannot pass that basic test, he has no business being a teacher in a multi-cultural, multi-dimensional and highly diverse setting like an inner-city school.
Further reading
In other blogs, I have been impressed with the way judges have been able to absent themselves from sentimentality and promote the secularist nature of our democratic societies and nowhere was that better expressed than in this blog - The case for State law over religious guidance.
The bit that caught my attention was this – “Legislation to protect views held purely on religious grounds could not be justified, it is an irrational idea and it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.
Click on the link to read the rest of the views of the aptly named, Lord Justice Laws.

Friday 12 April 2013

Thought Picnic: Living without an identity for 4 hours

I’m impressed
Despite the sometimes negative reports about tardy and inefficient passport processing activities at the government establishment that has gone through too many name changes for me to be bothered anymore, my three visits to the Home Office – Identity & Passport Service (IPS) have left me with no reason to complain.
In fact, the first was not a visit but it was when I changed my Nigerian passport for a British passport decades ago.
Time and cost
I decided against getting a British passport in Nigeria because the waiting time was 18 months though it would have cost me less than a fifth of what it costs to get the Entitlement to the Right of Abode (ERA) in my Nigerian passport but a waiting time of 3 weeks – I was planning on leaving Nigerian in 4 weeks.
For a few years, I got by with using my Nigerian passport in the UK until when returning from a visit to the Netherlands, the two of us Nigerian ERA passports became vectors of abuse because at the French customs held onto our passports for 90 minutes whilst they wondered if we were British enough to return home or not – that did it for me.
Quick and efficient
After a bit of procrastination, I filled in the forms and posted all the documents required on a Tuesday in London, by Saturday the letter dropped through my letterbox with a British passport – no interviews, no delays just efficiency – I was both shocked and surprised whilst glad I did not have to visit every embassy on God’s own earth to travel.
10 years later, I was living in the Netherlands and we are supposed to carry some form of identification with us at all times, though in the almost 13 years that I lived in the Netherlands, I never once was stopped in the streets to show my papers.
In fact, after 5 years of living in the Netherlands, you do have the option to chuck in whatever passport you have for a Dutch one. In my case, having a British passport does get you into more countries by default than any other passport.
Away from home
Again, I filled in the forms, visited the consular office in Amsterdam and was advised to return to pick up the new passport in 3 days despite the fact that old one had expired for weeks.
The only difference with this passport was that it had a Dutch issuing office but that seemed to faze one Dutch immigration clerk and I was left aghast at his ignorance.
In any case, my passport was to expire in November, but because of my travels, certain visas require I have at least 6 months left to run on my passport.
Time and cost again
I thought it best to consider renewing my passport before the summer holiday season when the passport office seems to be swamped with applications from travellers who have left it too late to get a passport with their holidays at the risk of being forfeited – I cannot live with that kind of stress.
The passport office offers a number of services for passport renewal, Premium 1-day service (4-hour turn-around), the Fast Track 1-week service or the normal service which could take up to 3 weeks or more.
You can trust that I weighed the consequences of time and cost like I did decades ago in Nigeria and I went for the Premium 1-day, which came to a fraction less than the cost of the normal service.
Village photographs on city forms
Whereas the normal service can be done through the post with some post offices offering and check-and-send service, the other two services require you visit a regional Identity & Passport Service office – working in North Wales, the nearest for my convenience was Liverpool.
What surprised me was my local post office in North Wales did not stock the passport forms, I had to visit a major city to pick up the forms, the first of which I made a mistake on, the second was wrongly guillotined and I finally decided on getting two forms and filling them separately at different times to minimise error.
Then for regulation photographs to go with my passport, the Chinese photographer who took the first set of pictures had me looking the palest shade of sick, I needed to try another photographer; that set was more vibrant in colour and after getting a few opinions, I decided on that set.
The essence of presence
I booked an appointment for a week in advance for 10:00AM in Liverpool and made sure my hotel was as close to the office as I could get.
We were not to arrive at the IPS office earlier than 10 minutes to the appointed time, I was there on-time, passed through security, checked-in at the reception and my ticket was called with 5 minutes – the checks took less than 5 minutes, I paid for the service and was asked to return in 4 hours for the new passport.
The collection time as set as 14:05 from the counter and that was to coincide with 4 hours from the moment payment was made.
New passport
I did return at a few minutes past 2:00PM and the security personnel observed that I had changed from a red tie to a white-speckled black day cravat – my passport was ready.
I was only without an identity document for 4 hours, it makes you wish other agencies like this for other countries were just as efficient, maybe I should resist the temptation of mentioning Nigeria – Sorry, I did.
I forgot to mention, the months left to run on my old passport were added to my new 10-year passport, you are allowed up to 9 months.

Monday 8 April 2013

Thought Picnic: The Questions That Challenge My Writing

Must I?
The urge to write but the absence of drive to type in the words that occupy my thoughts in waves of angst and debate sometimes haunts me.
As if there is an agenda and a deadline to meet, I find myself counting the days since I last put something on my blog realising it is not really the absence of things to write about but some involuntary decision to leave some issues to incubate to hatch into something more engrossing or when the whole idea seems incomplete, it is not ready for sharing.
It does?
Meanwhile, when I do get to post a tweet or two on Twitter, some of those thoughts attaching themselves to some personality, event or idea finds expression which could well trigger some debate and in that one does get some fulfilment.
However, the blog still remains in my view the compendium of thought, allowing acuity, application and purpose, ensuring the complete train of thought is properly given the rigour it deserves.
He was?
Having attended a book launch on Saturday or better still a launch of books that featured Nkem Ivara’s Closer Than A Brother [On Kindle] and Victor Ehikhamenor’s Excuse Me! [In Paperback and On Kindle] along with recitals by poets I only just learnt of at the meeting, Inua Ellams & Afam Akeh, I almost fancied myself a writer until I realised I am probably not as cut out for that level of genius that gives words the ability to excite spontaneous laughter and deep thought – blogs will suffice.
Interestingly, amongst the writers was a man whose mellifluously caustic and acerbic wit in his review of many books is worthy of a Pulitzer and much else – he says he is a reader, but there are many who want to read his opinions of many issues so whilst he reads, he must by all means write too. We know him as Pa Ikhide on Twitter and this is where he blogs.
And them?
By the time I knew what was going on, I was meeting @chemelumadu, @ChikaUnigwe, @RGAMeyer, @ChiomaChuka, @IkeAnya who was the compère, my cousin, then some names that had to get away for another event were in the audience apart from some Nigerian High Commission bigwigs who later joined us to make a table of 16 at a Thai restaurant afterwards.
As the life form of blogs go, I have gone from the lethargy of writing to name-dropping and thoughts of other blogs I could write about so many things that happened from the week past until today, but we’ll end here – the keyboard has a way of tapping into my subconscious and that’s me back in flow.