On Being Away, Caerus, She was Pretty, Opportunities, and Second Chances
Hello friends,
It's been a while. A pretty long while, if I must admit. From what I have gathered, quite a lot has happened on Steemit (and the new Hive) since my last presence on the platform(s). Well, I can say that Life happened to me, too. Over the space of two years, I have grown wiser and dumber all at once; I have become both outdoorsy and introverted, travelling to different amazing places and having to curl up in solitude within the confines of quiet rooms stacked against the background streets humming with less human life and more mechanical drudgeries. Like most of us, I have found joy in the little details of living and I have cried about big problems that life nonchalantly throws at one's feet like butter slapped unto bread. With me having changed location a couple of times within the last two years, migrating from my home country Nigeria to several cities in Europe, I have come to become all too familiar with the practice of finding hope in the essence of my sheer existence; I have learned to hold on to the refuge that lives not outside or around me, but the one that lives within, because, indeed, home, I have come to discover, is where the heart is.
Right now, my heart lies in the beautiful surreality of nature that lives within the enclose of Uppsala, Sweden, where I currently am. I am dazed by the remarkedly astute breath of fresh air that comes with glazing through its greenish plains, sandy trails, brilliant sky, colourful yet lone apartments and wading through the variabilities of its weather. But my heart is also steeped in a contemplative trance, one that I have been in since the start of the COVID-19. With C-19, I have come to meditate on the full, feelable yet transient nature of life. Humans, with their anatomies and ambitions, ideologies and industrialised forms of progressiveness, embody so much greatness, yet, like the peeping lady in Pierre Auguste Renoir's "Dance in the Country", we are powerless against the tides of fate that rove beneath the corporealities of experiences our mortal understanding can comprehend.
Fate! I use that word loosely like it is supposed to be a self-evident fact that everyone subscribes to. Well, true, the word and its denotation are controversial on so many levels, but if there is anything I have come to learn, it is that the word 'fate' is woven around the semantic and pragmatic configuration of human communication, in ways that are most times, merely implicit rather than explicit. For one, there is the word 'opportunity' which is, in all sense of the term, largely ascribed to a financial and economic mode of interpretation. Opportunity, according to the Online Cambridge English Dictionary, denotes "an occasion or situation that makes it possible to do something that you want to do or have to do, or the possibility of doing something." It is much like the antonym of fate; it is resisting the tides of life and grabbing tightly to what we want at the very moment it appears before our eyes. Sometimes, we defy the slipperiness of opportunities and hold on so tightly that what we so desire becomes ours; sometimes, we lose an opportunity because we could not see it or could not grab onto it well enough to not let it slip away.
To lose an opportunity is to not have been shrewd enough to know when a much-wanted something is ripe for the taking. It is what crypto enthusiasts would say when they want to talk about not buying Bitcoin in the early stage of its launch and development; it is what a businesswoman/man would say to refer to missing out on an investment deal due to distrust or ignorance; it is what a student would say when they are running late on a deadline and they remember the times they wiled away, doing something other than working on the assignment; it is what a woman or man would say if they had let a partner whom they loved so much walk away because of developing cold feet, lack of commitment or some other reason that they later come to discover is quite intangible; this is what Ji Sung-Joon says to Kim Hye-Jin, in the Kdrama She was Pretty, when she is asked by a boss to write a short children-themed article for the fashion magazine she is working for.
True enough, it is not her job; she is merely the translator and proofreader of the fashion magazine and how could she who had no experience in writing for a magazine take up the difficult task of writing a full-length article? Writing is only a hobby for her, a way to escape the hardship of her life (which had undergone a negative, grace-to-grass, rock-bottom downfall) and she wants it to stay that way. So she flatly refuses and tells her boss that she cannot and will not attempt to expose herself to the risk of writing an article for the magazine. Like in most Korean dramas, this is when her unrequited love interest who happens to be the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the fashion magazine steps up to the scene and comes to the rescue. He does not know too much about Kim Hye Shin at the time; in fact, he does not like her so much as he thinks that she is a lousy employee who works hard but rarely works smart, but something in him knows that he could not let her see an opportunity and watch it walk right past her.
So, at the close of work, he watches her walk to the bus-stop, and sit on a bench, waiting for the bus to arrive. He appears in front of her, hands in pocket, lips set, appearing like the ideal boss he pretends to be. Then he rambles nonsense about having to work extra time in order to meet the magazine's target for the month and walks away. If you were watching that scene, you would be as disappointed as I was. But then, Sung-Joon turns back, walks up to her again and sits beside her on the bench. There is an awkward moment of silence before he brings out his phone and shows her the picture that has been on his screen all along.
It is the picture of a naked man with a big build, flighty wings, feet that look weightless, barely touching the ground. His whole body is bent over as if he is trying to catch the wind in its downward stride with the scale he is holding in his hands. Hye-Jin squeals at his penis, which is stout and bulky like the rest of him; but Sung-Joon directs her attention to the character's hair and asks her what she notices.
Oh, he has got hair, she says. But only at his front; the back of his head is totally bald. His full-frontal hair is braided into a lock and it is tilting forward like the rest of this body.
He is Caerus, Sung-Joon says, the Greek mythological god of opportunity.
Oh, she says, while wondering what this god has to do with her.
Without waiting for a question, Sung-Joon proceeds to explain that Caerus, being the god of fortuitous events, can make things align in a person's favour and, thus, make it possible for a person to achieve something, but this is possible if such person happens to grab the lock of his hair while he is racing through the cosmos like a rocket crashing into intergalaxies with the speed of light. Because Caerus is totally bald at the back of his head and because he has wings at his feet like Hermes which cause him to run quickly, it is impossible to casually grab onto him from behind; one must timely and promptly seize him by his frontal lock and hold onto him tightly. To not grab him by his hair at the very right time is to lose an opportunity. And because the world is indeed very big, one cannot tell when Caerus is bound to come to town again.
Upon saying this, Sung-Joon stands up from the bench and walks away... again.
As one can tell, this is an allegorical, fitting description of what an opportunity is like. Thrifty and mythological as this allegory might be, I consider it to be a great metaphor that delineates all the several properties that come together in the proper harnessing of an opportunity. It gives great insight into the need to have the qualities of knowledge, focus, discipline, patience and proactiveness when looking to leverage on available availabilities that surround one. On a financial level, I came to learn early in life that financially successful people are those who have been able to grab onto the resources at their disposal and cause them to align in their favour. The biographical tidbits of information we know about the likes of Ali Baba, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs attest to this cliched but true principle. On a personal note, the time I spent on Steemit before now was, for me, an opportunity; one that had come at the right time when I had quit my job as a content editor and was wondering about what to do next with my life. Joining Steemit was indeed an opportunity that I was able to grab onto. Without even asking, I know the same goes for a lot of other @projecthope community members. That I was able to apply to the school that has caused my migration to Europe was an opportunity that I believe I also leveraged properly at the time. That I was able to reconnect to Steemit and Hive after conversing with @crypto.piotr and @samminator is another opportunity.
But, like the rest of us, I have also lost opportunities, trivial ones and several major ones that still hurt the core of my being. So, how do we deal with ourselves when Caerus runs past us and we are not able to grab on tightly onto his lock? What do we feel? I mean, what is there to feel if not hurt, disappointment, anger, pain and unhappiness. Honestly, this was what I felt throughout last year and this is what I have been feeling since the beginning of this year, I felt and still feel like I lost a lot of opportunities because I threw myself into the riotous, boisterous, tempestuous wind of 2020 and let myself lose my head; I let myself let COVID-19 be the premise upon which I did not act on a lot of available financial, academic and creative opportunities. And my heart grieved; my heart is still grieving.
However, being a binge-watcher and a lover of Asian entertainment (especially Kdramas, Kpop and Kdance routines), I have encountered one too many times a cinematic trope often used in Kdramas that annoys me sometimes but also warms up my heart. This trope is what I like to call Second Chance. To successfully pull off a "happily-ever-after" finale, most Korean rom-com series always create very tough situations that leave the main characters battered but eventually open them up to a new lease of life. In short, they make lost opportunities become blessings in disguise. Amnesia, rediscovered childhood love, time travel and return to youthfulness are ways through which second chances to granted to main characters who lost their chance at making it right the first time.
In my current contemplative state of existence, I have come to realise that human beings rarely give themselves a second chance to recover or start afresh. We beat ourselves over lost opportunities because we believe that life is short, yet we forget that the longer we beat ourselves up, the shorter life becomes and the more we begin to lose sight of other opportunities that are right before our eyes at the very moment. So, as much as this reflection is all about the good things life brings to us if and when we grab onto the opportunities that surround us, it is also about owning up to the misadventure of actually losing opportunities and embracing the possibility of second chances or, in fact, new prospects. True enough, when Caerus' back is turned to us, all we see is baldness and bareness, but, on the flip side, it also presents the possibility of a return, of recovery, of, once again, meeting him face to face if only we manage to move forward and look ahead.
And, oh, while you would think that Kim Hye Shin, the lousy employee, was the only one nearly losing out on an opportunity, Sung-Joon, the smarty pants, was also nearly letting go of a second chance because he could not bring himself to accept the change that comes with a chance. You see, one of the purposes of his coming back to New York from Korea was to look for a childhood first love whom he had lost contact with upon his emigration 15 years earlier. He always nearly finds her but he always never does, not until he begins to realise that, sometimes, what we are searching for from afar is staring us right in the face.
Well, with this hint, I am sure you can already guess who this childhood first love was.