why it's called an ASSumption

I was wide awake at 3:00 pm on that sweltering hot afternoon, as wide awake as I was exactly 12 hours before at 3:12 in the a.m…. yap. Honestly, the stuff I’d found to keep me awake that night and day was totally potent and would probably replace miraa, Lol!! And although I’m laughing now a few days later, let me assure you that on that particular night I was thoroughly downright upset as my brain ticked at the speed of some meteorite in outer space – out there somewhere– hurtling itself towards Earth. I had pulled every stunt imaginable to induce sleep… including going onto FaceBook to find some night owls – zip - opening the windows wide open to let in cool air -  wapi? Reading a book off Kindle – boring!! But to no avail, I was stunningly wide-awake.

So how did I get to be so wide awake and STILL wide awake for over 24 hours without a headache, a hangover, and so super hyper that my daughter said I was like, 13x a Duracell battery??

Rewind to scene a few days before:

Last week I’d been having this strange on-off frog-in-throat-blocked nose-fluey feeling for about 2 days and when it flared up into a painful sore throat, I trooped into the neighborhood pharmacy and asked for ‘something to stop this’, and the kind Doc gave me some over the counter Cough syrup and then asked me to pick some Coldcap tablets from the shelf behind me.

Weka pause.

I’m a mshamba, I’ve been in Nairobi all of nine (9) months, and I didn’t know they had Coldcap capsules in BLUE and ORANGE… (stop laughing!!) when I left Nairobi in 2010  Coldcap was PINK- so my hand hovered uncertainly over the many options, then picked the brightest one after seeing the delightful inscriptions  - DAY TIME, NIGHT TIME.

Done.

Bounced home.

Forward to hours later, and I was in my bedroom sleepily looking at the box wondering - so what is the difference, really, between the day time and night time?? My 1^st Assumption: Surely the daytime orange is simply minus the ‘whatever makes you sleep’ chemical?

Well…. the incredible state of being wide awake was via the 2 orange coloured - perfectly legal (simply because over-the-counter-drugs are legal, and this super tab was not even a prescription drug ) pills. My mistake was I forgot to read the instructions. Well, I didn’t forget per se.., I did read them, but because I was sleepy, I ignored the instructions and swallowed the wrong coloured pills (you may heave big sigh here!!!).  My 2^nd Assumption was made 24 hours later: The orange capsule is not ‘simply minus’ a compound, it has an added additive that keeps you clearly awake!!

Sasa, before some trooper comes along and asks if I’m trying to advertise some miraa based ‘legal pill’, let me be quick to clarify that there’s a point to this short blog – and that is that often, we make terrible mistakes through ‘assuming’.

Apart from the sarcastic slogan which amplifies that ‘assume makes an ass out of u and me’, an assumption is an ugly ass vehicle to drive  (kind of like a Probox ), because it is a solid belief held by the ‘assumer’ – and it’s based on nothing. Just as we avoid Proboxes on the road, we also avoid people who walk around making assumptions about us. Why? Because an assumption is a solid belief bila Proof.  And unfortunately, I will raise my hand and say YES, I have often been under the influence of this mistaken form of thinking.  I had been for a long time rather assuming about various people’s lives, making wrong judgments and being a hard liner, refusing to see that there are large gray areas in-between the black and the white.

Fine, sticks and stones may break my bones, but that thing about ‘words can never hurt me’, oh, HA HA!! They do. Especially when someone real close to you makes a careless remark probably punctuated somewhere in there with the apologetic (or not) statement : “oh, I thought….!”  Unfortunately, depending on your mindset, that particular statement may stay with you for a long time, festering in your thoughts and slowly brewing a simmering anger. Yes, there are those who couldn’t give a damn about what you think or say about them, but there are souls out there who do and they hurt when assumed – and not all hurting people believe in turning the other cheek.

What changed my hard liner thinking?

Wisdom, age, an appreciation of life itself, and human nature made me stop this terrible habit and I no longer make careless whispers or talk, regardless of the authenticity of the information set before me. Experience too, because I have also resided in the house of being ‘assumed’ – when some around me thought I was ‘ok’ just because I often smiled and told a lot of terrible but extremely funny jokes.  The truth is that no one likes to see hurt, pain or neediness in others. So we quietly throw our fears under the Assume Blanket about those who are hurting, or in pain, or in need – we make up stories about them based on ‘air’ and despite having no proof, stamp that person as ‘WRITE.ASSUMPTION.HERE’. Whether in the negative or positive, sticking a Label onto anybody is a nasty habit.

I now take the time to divide my priorities between those who I truly care about and those who are on the peripherals of my life, taking the time to listen carefully and meditate on what I have been told by the individual themselves, rather than listen to a whole litany of hogwash of nonsense from some third party.

But there are those who lie, you say…

Duh! Yes, there are, and that is when you listen ever more judiciously to the lie, sorting out the truths from the half lies and the full lies. Sorting out the ‘gray areas’ that instead of assuming, we should individually take the time to carefully decipher before making an ‘oh, I thought’ comment. And yes, you can tell the truth from fact. This can be illustrated simply: Take a piece of music that you absolutely love, put on headphones or earphones then pick out each instrument as it plays, one by one. Plus each vocalist, including the background singers.

By practicing and repeating the above we can train our ears to hear individual players in each and every orchestra, if we so wish. It’s also by dropping it like it’s hot – ‘IT’  being our Assuming Habits,  that we can learn to really hear those we care about.

My assumptions about a simple capsule led me to take a wrong one. Assumptions about people are much more devastating and may have far more serious repercussions than a simple loss of sleep and some super hyperactivity, and if you have ever been judged by someone bila proof, then you know exactly how much it sucks, so instead of repeating that Karma cycle onto ourselves, let us all stop being assuming Proboxes.

Nyakio J Munyinyi for The xPenSieve Report © February 2014