Learn to choose only what’s best for your life

 

There are so many options in life, you have to choose what suits you. FOTOSEARCH 

By Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara

In Summary

• Choose to be at the cause of the effects in your life— because if anyone deserves it, it is you.

It was quite funny watching a policeman on TV literally chase pedestrians to follow the traffic rules and use footbridges earlier this week.

Those bridges cost so much and caused us all so much inconvenience during their construction that if we must be forced to use them to keep ourselves safe, we are bleeding our coffers more than graft does.

Seeing the charred shell of the car that was torched by an angry mob after the driver ran over a pedestrian on the other hand was not in the least bit funny. Did you see that?

To begin with, place your newspaper down. Slowly. Stand up and observe a meaningful minute of silence for the departed soul. We must respect the dead – we’re all headed in that direction.

Back to the policeman. He had to force people to use the footbridge. You would imagine that just knowing that it is a high-traffic road especially at rush hour, we would appreciate the safety of the foot-bridge. Nope!

We’re in a hurry so we’re going to dart across the road even if we risk being run over. For a moment there I thought perhaps some of us do not know that we are legally required to use the footbridge. Wrong! We do know. In fact, we appreciate the thinking behind the construction of the bridge. It is just that playing Russian roulette with speeding cars on the road is shorter.

I mean; you know how it is when you’re dashing home from a long workday… and if those “selfish”, “inconsiderate” and “arrogant” motorists run over any of us, we will burn his or her car to ashes. This should be a lesson to all you motorists speeding around here. How dare you run over one of us!

Wow. Priceless. So the issue is not that we do not know the danger we put ourselves in. It isn’t even that we do not know the safer alternative and yes, we are aware that it is a legal requirement to use the footbridge.

Allow me not to go into the little matter of those of us who leisurely stroll across the same road while on phone, but woe unto you if you should run over any of us driving your fancy car. Oh and we don’t care if you’re only the driver either. We still consider you insensitive to our plight.

Why do we do things like these? Well, I told you already; its shorter to simply run across the road, don’t you get it? I know you don’t. Let me help you out; the widest gap in the whole world lies between what we know and what we actually do.

I am sure you’ve had plenty of unfortunate situations where you’ve wondered how it is that a well-informed, educated, exposed and experienced person could make some very pedestrian mistakes. It is this very gap. It is called the Knowing-Doing Gap.

We know better, but we ignore our knowledge and act in the exact opposite way. Why bother acquiring the knowledge in the first place?

Sounds like the best definition of insanity, doesn’t it? Its simply ignorance of how it is that we create the situations in our lives (or deaths in this unfortunate instance).

When we acquire knowledge or generate our own ideas, they are lodged in our conscious mind. Our conscious mind being objective, can accept or reject any idea fed to it.

All our knowledge stays here, but is completely useless to us until we internalise it.