Tomorrow: The quiet loss of today

 There is a word that lives very comfortably in my mouth. Tomorrow. I use it often. I hear it often, and I love to sing Annie's Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will call. I will come tomorrow. I will try tomorrow. I will explain tomorrow. I will show up tomorrow. It is really such an easy word to offer but such a difficult one to hold accountable. 

Lately, I have been thinking about tomorrow, especially because I have been hearing it a lot from someone dear to me. For the last three days, they have been saying that they will come tomorrow. Tomorrow quietly turned to another tomorrow. This happens in the way important conversations get postponed, not because they are impossible but because they are uncomfortable. Probably we do have the intention to do something, but the action keeps getting delayed. 

A few days ago, I was talking to my nieces about what a horizon is. I said it is that place in the distance where the sky seems to touch the water (we were looking out at the lake). They asked me where it is exactly and I did not have a simple answer because no matter how much you walk toward it, it keeps moving. The horizon never becomes a place you can stand on. And it just struck me that tomorrow is the same. Tomorrow is like a horizon. You can keep your eyes on it forever but you will never arrive.

There is something quietly sad about that, because life does not happen on the horizon. Life happens where your feet are. 

In mostly traditional African ways of living, time is not so much about clocks but about life, activity, necessity and doing what needs to be done, You fetch water when it is time to fetch water. You sweep when it is time to sweep. You light the fire when it is time to cook. In the past when families used to sit around the fire (still happens in especially nomadic pastoralist communities), they do not say "tomorrow I will be warm". You become warm now when you light the fire and sit around it. 

I think tomorrow has become a soft hiding place where we can store things that we are not ready to face. Things like apologies, difficult conversations, commitments, change, etc. Is it that saying "tomorrow" often feels kinder than saying "no"? Or is "tomorrow" just another way of saying "not now" and "not now" slowly becomes "never"? Tomorrow feels safer than today. Today requires courage. Today asks us to show up as we are, and not as who we might become. Today requires effort. But tomorrow is untouched. It is full of possibility, but possibility that never meets action remains imagination. 

I feel this in small personal ways. When I wait for a call that keeps being postponed. When I delay sending a message I know I should send. When I tell myself I will start something tomorrow and then I watch days quietly pass. This is real everyday stuff. I really feel sad and even grieved for the todays that were traded for tomorrows that never arrived. 

I believe in tomorrow. I believe in hope and in planning (I am such a planner). But I am learning to trust today more. Today is real. Today is where love can be felt. Today is where relationships either grow or quietly thin. Today is where apologies can be said. Today is where someone can show up and where a hand can be held and a difficult conversation can be attempted. Today is where effort can be seen. 

From where my feet are, I am going to try to practice choosing the present. I will try to live a little more inside today. When I hear the word tomorrow from others or myself, I am going to pause and ask myself, what can be done today? I will try to notice the moment I am in, then the next one, and then the next because life is not waiting for me in tomorrow. Life is happening today. Here and now, where my feet are planted.  

Constipation: When the system refuses

 Constipation is frustrating. Not mildly frustrating but annoyingly frustrating. It is not just an inconvenience. It is frustrating on a deep, spiritual and existential level. I am on the loo doing everything that has worked before, including sudoku, but nothing is working now. Under normal conditions, things move. You eat, you live and you release. You do not even have to think about it because it is a natural process. It is like a basic agreement based on trust, where you do your part of eating fibre regularly within a balanced diet, and the body does its thing. Accountability. 

Regular bowel movements are proof that systems are working, while constipation, I am realising, is what happens when the system refuses. I am pushing strategically, with intention, with posture adjustments and controlled breathing. The wellness industry has told us that mindful breathing can solve most of our problems. Anyway I am breathing deeply, expanding my lungs as if oxygen might persuade stubborn muscles. I am singing softly to my insides like an Africa parent coxing a child who has wedged themselves in the security bar grid. I am scrolling my phone pretending that distraction might accidentally trigger cooperation.

Nothing. 

It will not come because it is not ready, not softened, not prepared and not interested in participating in my plans for the day. It has decided without consulting me that today is not the day.

From where my feet are, this feels painfully familiar. This feels like politics in Uganda.

People love to say "push harder" as though pressure alone has ever solved a deeply clenched problem. As though politics is the gym where effort automatically equals results. Citizens push. The youth push. The women's groups push. Activists push. Every election cycle becomes another deep breath, another hopeful squat, another collective strain wrapped in patriotic language. 

Still nothing moves.

I am learning that you cannot force release from a system that has been holding on for decades. You cannot shout it loose. You cannot tweet or sing it out. You cannot pray it out. You cannot hashtag your way into structural relaxation. A system that has been trained to retain will retain, even when retention becomes painful, even when the body itself is showing clear signs of distress, and even when everyone can see this is no longer healthy. 

What exhausts or frustrates me most is not the refusal, but the pretending. 

Pretending something is happening. Pretending progress is being made. Pretending discomfort is normal. Pretending  waiting quietly on our phones counts as motion. Pretending pressure equals progress. Pressure without movement is not progress. it is rather stagnation with better branding.

Constipation is not laziness. It is effort without reward. It is readiness without response. It is knowing that something must move and realising you do not control the muscles that matter. People say, "be patient" as if patience is a moral virtue in every situation. Patience when misused become an accomplice. Patience is useful when something is cooking. Patience begins to feel dangerous when something is rotting. 

But you know what? I did not wake up one day constipated. 

And like politics, we ate our way here as Ugandans. We swallowed compromises. We digested silence. We normalised delay. We accepted "not now" so many times.

From where my feet are, I understand something uncomfortable: bodies insist on resolution and history does too, for that matter. But release after prolonged constipation is never elegant. It is not graceful and not instagrammable. It is painful and sometimes things tear. Sometimes things break. Sometimes what comes out carries the stench of everything that was held too long. 

That is why I am (was) angry on this toilet. 

I am angry at the strain. Angry at the repetition. Angry at being told to keep breathing when oxygen is not the problem. I am tired of pushing. Tired of symbolic gestures. I am tired of being advised to wait, when waiting is precisely how we got stuck.

Constipation is frustrating. From where my feet are, a country that refuses to let go is worse. 

The hot charcoal between us

 Today, I saw a child holding a glowing piece of charcoal on a large spoon. He walked slowly, carefully, focused and serious about what he was doing. The way he carefully moved indicated that he understood that what he was carrying was important. It wasn't the first time I was seeing this, but this simple scene lingered longer in my mind than I expected. In many Ugandan homes, cooking is done on a sigiri (charcoal stove) or firewood, both which require a deliberate and sometimes long process of lighting the firewood or charcoal. To make it quicker, a hot piece of charcoal can be used light the fire. A child is sent to neighbour to ask for a small burning piece from the neighbour's fire so that they can light their own fire. This is such a common place practice that it barely feels worth mentioning  and yet it carries deep meaning. No one questions it and no one keeps record. You give the hot piece of charcoal because tomorrow you might be the one who needs it. You give because taking a small burning piece from your fire does not make your fire burn less. You give because fire has always been something that moves. 

Seeing that child struck me how much trust is contained in that small act. Trust that the neighbour will say yes. Trust that the giving of a burning piece of charcoal is normal and accepted. It made me think about many of our oldest values that live quietly in our ordinary routines. The small movement between homes is Ubuntu in practice - I exist because you exist and that our lives are woven together in ways that do not always need explanation. 

For a long time, African communities have been built around this kind of shared living. People borrowed salt, matches, sugar, time and care. If a household did not have enough food, children would be sent to a neighbours home at mealtime and no one would question it. They would eat there and life would continue. On another day when that neighbour was struggling, their children would appear at your door and you would feed them. It was understood without being discussed. Relatives were sent to live with relatives who had more means and this was not seen as a burden, but as responsibility. Families were extended not only by blood, but by commitment, and we looked out for each other in practical ways. You did not need to calculate whether someone deserved help. The fact that they were part of your community was reason enough, and it was generally understood that survival itself was communal. No one stood alone. 

Recently, I was talking with my friend Ignatius about this idea of caring for the neighbour and we found ourselves circling difficult questions. He explained it like this:  If I am eating and my neighbour is hungry, how does that affect me as an individual? If my children are going to school and  neighbours children are not how does that affect me in the long run? At first those may seem like moral questions, he said, but they are also practical ones. A hungry neighbour does not simply remain a hungry neighbour. A child who never goes to school does not simply remain a child who missed out. Over time, hunger hardens, exclusion accumulates and desperation grows, and one day, the same neighbour may become the person who jumps over my fence not out of evil but out of need. Definitely not because they are a criminal, but because society quietly pushed them into a corner. 

This is uncomfortable to admit because it blurs the line between personal responsibility and collective responsibility. It forces us to ask the question, "where does my duty end?" "How far does my care extend?" "Am I responsible for only myself and my household or am I in some way responsible the the conditions in which my neighbour is living?"

The Bible captures this tension in a haunting way. After Cain kills his brother Abel, God asks him where his brother is. Cain responds "Am I my brother's keeper?" It is a defensive question that tries to draw a boundary around responsibility, but also the story itself seems to suggest that the answer is not as simple as Cain wants it to be. This question has lingered across generations because it refuses to go away. It surfaces every time we choose whether to care or look away. 

In many ways, Ubuntu already answered that question. Ubuntu says yes, you are your brother's keeper. You are your brother's keeper not in the sense that you control their life, but in the sense that your life is tied to theirs. Their suffering will eventually find its way into your space and also their wellbeing could eventually strengthen your world. 

And yet slowly, something is shifting. As individualism, competition, personal success are becoming more dominant, we are beginning to change how we relate to one another. We are encouraged to accumulate, protect what is ours, and to be self-sufficient, with independence being a measure of strength. These ideas do have value and I am not dismissing them. However, they have quietly introduced a certain hardness where we hesitate more and measure more. We ask what we will gain. We fear being taken advantage of, which is quite fair. That small instinctive generosity that once defined our daily life is becoming less automatic and more calculating. 

Today, even small acts of sharing can feel heavy like sharing information, sharing opportunities, sharing time, and sharing attention. We start to treat giving as loss rather than circulation, and yet the logic of the charcoal remains true.  Giving a small piece of your fire does not extinguish your own. Helping someone light their fire does not mean yours will go out. If anything, it keeps warmth moving through the community. What if leadership was understood as tending a collective fire rather than guarding a personal one? What if success was measured not only by what one has gathered, but also by how many people one has helped stand?

The child who walks next door does not talk about Ubuntu philosophy. They simply go, return with a burning piece of charcoal, light their own fire, and life continues. Could that be the lesson? We know that Ubuntu is not something we perform but something we practice daily through the choices we make that say, you matter and I see you. 

From where I stand, the strength of our future will come from whether we are willing and still willing to offer hot pieces of charcoal to one another, and whether we are willing in the deepest sense, to be our brother's keeper. 

'IF' and the distance between ideals and practice

 At the beginning of this year, I was going through a box with stuff from my high school days - 20 years ago. I can across a book where I had written several poems that I loved. Somewhere in the middle was written the poem 'IF' by Rudyard Kipling. It is a poem about character, steadiness, restraint and becoming a certain kind of person in a complicated world. Back then, I admired and tried to be the kind of person that Kipling hoped his son would be. For about a week now, I have been thinking a lot about this poem in a practical way as a measuring stick. Well, I am not necessarily measuring myself against it exactly, but measuring the space between what it asks of us and what I see around me. 

Some mornings on my run, I pass through a market where a woman sells fruits and vegetables and prepares fired cassava for commuters' breakfast. She is always there early and arranges her tomatoes carefully. She greets people softly and will sometimes give a school kid a stick of fried cassava without being asked. Sometimes she is bargaining with customers especially during the dry season when vegetables are more expensive, and very often I have seen she looks really tired. 

Nothing about this is extraordinary and yet everything about it feels important. The poem IF is not about grand moments of heroism and boasts of triumph. It is about ordinary moments of honesty, endurance and peace. It talks about who you are when no one is watching, and this is where I start to feel the tension. 

We live in a time where shortcuts are celebrated and where loudness and the most intellectual argument wins. Today, success is increasingly defined by display rather than substance, and corruption is no longer shocking but actually expected. In Uganda corruption was once a distant monster, large and shadowy in far away offices that we would ever enter, and rooms that we would never sit in. But today the monster has been tamed. It has learnt our local languages and it walks among us, no longer faceless, but has a face and a name that looks like a neighbour and a friend. We fed the monster in the ordinary spaces through the small permissions we kept giving it. The official asking for "something small" to move or remove a file; the boss who hired his cousin instead of a qualified stranger, the student who cheats and calls it smart. None of these people woke up saying "today I will destroy my country." They wake up saying "I need to survive." 

Going back to the poem, which I have read several times as I write this, it does not speak to perfect people. I speaks to pressured people. It speaks to people who are tempted, tired, angry, hungry, needy, and who are surrounded by bad examples. The poem tells them to hold the line anyway, which could be such an uncomfortable message, especially in the Ugandan context, where holding your line can make you look foolish and where integrity looks like weakness. Saying "no" in some spaces may even feel like self-sabotage. 

This conflict is not only in the big spaces where billions of shillings are diverted or pocketed. It is also in small places where a supermarket cashier accidentally gives extra change and someone quickly pockets it, or at the office where a mistake is quietly hidden instead of corrected. Often in conversations, everyone complains about our leaders, and rightly so, because they are the very faces of corruption, but nobody wants to talk about personal responsibility. This makes me wonder whether the hardest part about the poem is not its idealism but its insistence on personal agency. The poem does not say "if the system is fair and good"; it says "if you can be good in an unfair, poor and corrupt system", which is harder. 

Even if the poem is not African, there is something deeply African about it. Many of our traditional proverbs say similar things: A person is a person because of other people; Character is not announced, it is revealed; The way you treat what you did no earn shows who you are. These are not flashy teachings. They are in fact quite quiet. Thinking back to Ugandan behaviours like sweeping the compound in the morning, greeting elders, greeting people on the streets, returning a goat that has strayed or a chicken that has wandered too far... these are acts that shape our moral spine as Africans. Sometimes we think that our problem as Ugandans is that we we lack values. No. I believe that we have gotten tired of practicing them. Practicing values is exhausting. Practicing values requires patience in a world that moves really fast and wants things now. It requires self control or restraint in a world that rewards appetite and greed. And then when I think of the lady at the market selling her vegetables every morning, I see a quiet dignity. She is practicing values. She will ever read this blog, may never hold office, may never trend online, which brings me to one of the ideas in the poem IF that stays with me. It is the notion of steadiness. Of being able to endure praise and criticism without being destroyed by either.

This feels relevant now where we live in an age of constant performance and everyone is curating a version of themselves, branding and rebranding their name to trend. It becomes easy to start living for reaction instead of reality, irrespective of who one steps on along the way. Destroy someone's name to build yours - type thing. But character is not performance. Character is what remains when nobody is clapping, liking, reacting, retweeting. I think about how many scandals we see and how often people fall and we quickly move on. We discuss corruption as entertainment and consume dysfunction hungrily as content. How slowly we are becoming desensitised! In fact, the poem IF feels stubborn by contrast. It insists that self-mastery still matters, not because you will be rewarded, not because the world is fair but because you have to live with yourself. This to me is the most Ugandan part about this conversation. Traditionally shame was not only social. If anything it was largely internal because you carried your actions inside you and had to answer to your ancestors, to your name, to your tribe, to your lineage, in a moral sense. It was about the kind of person you were adding to your family story and to community memory. 

It is easier to talk about broken systems than broken selves. It is easier to demand better leaders than to become better people. It is easier to quote poems, speeches, philosophers than to live them. 

As a teenager, I used to read the poem IF like a checklist. But now I read it as direction to not be perfect, but to try to be steady, honest, patient, decent, especially when it feels pointless. Uganda is not collapsing from only the big betrayals but also from the millions of small surrenders. Likewise, we can rebuild Uganda in a similar way - small honesty, small courage, small restraint, everyday. I do not know what Uganda will look like in 50 years, but I know the kind of country I want to live in. A country where character is not old-fashioned, where people still care about being good when it is inconvenient, where integrity is not treated as weakness or naivety, where poems like IF endure because they keep asking us an uncomfortable question - not what is the world like, but who are you going to be in it. And perhaps from where I stand, that question is enough to begin with. 

How we enter the day

 Morning rituals are underrated. They do a lot of quiet work for us and set us up for the day. In many African contexts, especially in villages, the day starts with something practical. You wake up and you sweep the compound. In every corner of Uganda, mornings are greeted with the same sound of a broom sweeping a yard. Before school, breakfast, anything else, compounds are swept. The sweeping is a ritual. It is not only about cleanliness. It is about order. You put the space right, before you put yourself in the world or before the world comes to you.

Everyone has a version of this. Some people wake up and pray or meditate. Some go for a walk or run. Others stretch. Some scroll (questionable, but still a ritual nonetheless). The point is not what the ritual is. It is more what it does. A ritual grounds you. A morning ritual marks a transition from sleep to being a person with responsibilities. It gives the day a starting point. 

My morning ritual is coffee. I wake up and the first thing I do is make and have a cup of coffee quietly. I think and reflect and check in with myself. This is less about the caffeine and more about orientation. There is a lot of noise out there - work, news, social media, other people's urgencies, misbehaving teenagers, etc and it is very easy to get absorbed into all that and forget yourself. Sitting quietly with a cup of coffee is my way of anchoring to remind myself who I am before I step into everything else. 

Morning rituals do an important psychological work. They create consistency and some sort of sense of control. My ritual keeps me sane. Making and drinking coffee every morning is a small and repeatable act wherein I say to myself this is how I begin my day. Without this morning coffee time, my days seem to blur into each other and I start reacting instead of choosing. 

Fairly recently, I included a friend in my morning ritual of drinking coffee. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we do not. They scroll, read and scroll some more, and I either read or sit with myself in silence. The point is not conversation. It is presence. It is sharing a moment and being connected before the day pulls us in different directions. 

Morning rituals do not have to be loud or sacred for them to matter. Sweeping a compound, running, reading, praying, drinking coffee. These things keep us aligned and help us take ourselves into the day, rather than losing ourselves to it. 

A home for my voice

 I spend a lot of time thinking and observing. I am an introvert and an INTJ, which means I live a large part of my life inside my head. Over time, and especially as I grow older, I have realised that the small things are becoming more and more fascinating to me. A rock on the ground. A fallen leaf on the path. A meal being prepared. A group of teenagers at the mall. I keep noticing that there is a lesson in almost everything, or at least there is something worth paying attention to. I believe deeply in the African proverb that says, even a small stream has a story. 

This blog exists because of that noticing. It is not about giving answers, nor is it about arriving at neat conclusions. These are just notes, wondering, questions, and the places where my thoughts wander. Most of the time, this is simply what is running through my mind, because I am always in my mind. Thinking. Rethinking. Turning things over. Trying to understand myself, people, two chickens and the world a little better. 

I wanted to create a space where I can put these thoughts and return to them, reading again to see how they have changed over time. But I also wanted a place where others can see them because there is no real harm in letting people in. Someone might find something interesting here. Someone might find something useful or something familiar. Like the African proverb (I love these a lot), wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one person can embrace it alone. We learn by sharing and we grow by listening to each other. 

This space is also about learning and sharing from my experiences. You may learn about who I am, about where I am and the different places I go to. You will probably also learn about my culture because my observations come through the lens of being Ugandan. You may also learn about where I am going, in all the ways a person can be going. 

Sometimes this will be a place where I simply pour my thoughts through writing and maybe stumble into answers I did not know I was looking for. Sometimes it will be a place to place things.

For me writing is a way of staying close to myself. So this is a home for my voice.

If you are here, you are invited to read, invited to sit for a while, invited to make your own observations about life because life continues.

There is so much happening all the time and it is easy to move through it without really seeing. This is my moment to stop, reflect, ground and look closely; closely enough to watch and catch lightning strike because it disappears quickly. And it would be a shame not to notice.