Some Fights are Won Without Fighting.

I know the title of this article sounds amusing. It is akin to winning a gold medal without ever running. But that is the beauty of the field of life. It is your own race, which means you win as an individual because you are not racing against anybody else in your lane in the race of life.

The difference comes with how you fathom and react to the fact that you are alone in the race and that your competition is more intra as opposed to external. You choose to simply stay motionless for as long as you wish, still you will win.

If you decide to remain set, get up and keep going, you will win too. The reward at the end of the race determines a lot about ourselves. There is nothing as hard as knowing that you are in a race alone. This is the precise reason some of us veer off course and go competing with others.

In a language not intended to profane decency and sanity, someone once said that trying to compete to poo with an elephant is but a suicide mission. That is what most people end up doing; getting to put themselves into uncalled for competitions which lead them into but disappointments only.

Figuring out this aspect of winning fights not fought came into the limelight last week when I turned a year old. It dawned on me that soon I will need answers to some very personal and reflexive questions that people will start to ask me a few years to come.

One of the commonest question people ask is, what would you tell your twenty something now if you had the opportunity? Before I go further, this question is often asked those people who have succeeded in life. So, to begin with, succeeding in life has to be a plan set and starting to be worked on from the teen years right into old age.

I considered that question last week and wondered what I will be answering when asked this question in future. How has my twenties been? I found myself answering, I can’t explain. The mixed feeling of knowing that I am transitioning into a new phase of life led me to answer that way.

This is largely due to the fact that I am looking, in plain view, the cut off age for being called a youth. In other words, there is no other sure time I know of other than now, that aging is inevitable and with each passing day I am marking my close of life sheet.

This in a nutshell makes the largest part of my war which I have chosen not to fight. To fight aging is akin to racing with time. To try and be at bar with the clock is a war lost before even it is fought. All one can do is manage their time and make the most of it.

Same way I chose not fight the war against transitioning from one age to another, something that simply means depreciation in every aspect of my human nature except experience and wisdom which perhaps are becoming the greatest weapons of fighting without really fighting for me.

Growing older has also taught me that we should know when we cannot simply win a war and choose to walk away. In love, it is said that you cannot learn to love fully unless you are heartbroken. It is the few places where lots of value can be drawn out of the broken.

In real life, if there is a war and you decide to break a rib and jaw and a spinal cord, It means end of life. Breaking even one part of the body is not worthy the fight fought. If it cannot lead us to our early graves, it ensures we live long painful and misery filled lives.

It is my desire to choose to walk away when I sense the change in atmosphere. It is wise to be called a coward especially when all it means is joy and peace to us. When I will have won a peaceful life trophy, someone else would have lost all including life also simply for wanting to fight a war that cannot be won.

What about fighting for love? I will always choose to wait for it come to me. Maybe I will have to fight for it. It cost the life of Christ to fight for the salvation of mankind. It was a love equal to none. When I attain love of that caliber relative to my human level, then that is what I will have to fight for. Yet even this, I will win by not really fighting but rather by losing everything.

When violence will be brewing in the pot fired by human folly, I will cook peace in my own pot. If people will choose to pick me up for a war of competition in the race of life, I will remind myself that it is not worth picking a fight for. We are all in our own races and we will win at some point. However, I will push myself to run that race faithfully, finish it like the apostle Paul and wait for my crown too.

But I should spell out a disclaimer in this resolute. Let it not be taken to mean that I can be trodden, that I can be taken advantage of, that I should be abused or anything nasty that goes with choosing to win without a fight.

It is still remaining true that a rat pushed to a corner is bound to jump. When it reaches a point such as that, it means a fight as the very last resort. But that is on a far extreme. For now, I would rather win my war by not choosing to fight at all. This is what the world requires now in large quantities.

Let us enjoy the moments as they come. It is our own races after all. But one which need a lot of discipline to be won.

End