We can buy peace

This is what I have discovered today.

When you are so disturbed with circumstances you nearly expire, take the cheap way out: Go to a recreation facility to think and not think; forget yourself and live again; pray and play.

So, I decided around 2 O'crock morning today to spend half-day today just to relax- me and nature. Six O'cross sharp, I left home and headed for Namiwawa Park, sat at the lower end, some five metres from Mudi river, and welcomed the morning.

It was a wonderful feeling to spend the first two hours thinking nothing; sure, thinking about nothing. I looked at the green grass without seing grass; the brown soils were not soils but nothing; the waters, black and stinking as Mudi has become, were not water at all, but something crawling without form or legs.

It is what I call regeneration.

After two hours of regeneration came the one hour for thinking; thinking about anything one sees around Namiwawa Park. The green grass, the tall mahogany and other trees, the bamboos, concrete steps, chameleons and more.

There is no better feeling than to know that the trees are watching you sob, and cry, and push back the tears. It may be tears of days that were, and will never be; tears for those that were, and are not; for those that are not, but will be. And the many things that will become what they will, despite being absent in our minds today.

I can say without fear of contradiction that the feeling that prayers (your prayers) have been answered hits you so hard when you realise that the trees are listening, conveying the message to the free air around, and getting responses back to your system through the oxygen we inhale. Of course, it must needs be that carbon dioxide takes our fears away from us, deposists them in the air, and the fears come back as strength- strengthened by oxygen's regeneration power.

That is what I thought today, at Namiwawa Park.

You can't believe it, but I spend the last one hour drinking fresh milk. I went to Metro in Blantyre, bought two-one litre bottles of Dairibord fresh milk (of course, in frozen state) and set for Namiwawa Park.

By the time my frozen milk 'got back to its senses', it was well after three hours.

It was a good thing to do, really; and, being alone at the Park, gave me an opportunity to reflect on the challenges faced during this year, opportunities and the way forward. It has been sad the past two weeks, because something happened inside me.

But the trees, perspiring happily around me, and the grass (courageous enough to survive the trods of men and women) gave me the courage and comfort I have needed the past two weeks, and I am happy to be, again- having overcome whatever happened inside me.

Of course, there was nothing like exercising. You know much as I that it is extra work, and goes against the grain of relaxing and coming back to.

Let life begin for me; the life I was supposed to live.