It was a Saturday afternoon. I went to the salon to have a haircut but met the place filled up. I decided to drive to another salon downtown and bumped into Fred. Fred got talking. "About 10 years ago, I had a fight with a friend in school. It was a dirty college brawl. I received a heavy blow on the head- it was with a log of wood snatched from the roadside by my opponent. I blanked out but was resuscitated a few minutes later. I got home that day but never mentioned it to anyone- my parents inclusive. I was embarrassed to talk about a fight that I lost. However, a few years later, I became convulsive and started acting funny. Nobody in my family could place a finger on what was wrong with me. My case kept degenerating by the day until I began to suffer from severe medical impairment."

Fred went on but with a frown on his face. "At this point, I had lost my way. I didn't know what was happening. It was reported that I started soliloquizing. Within a short period, I started hallucinating too- I was seeing things unimagined by those around me. It was at this stage that I became paranoid. There was an assumed danger all around me. Everyone was set on edge because I became a nuisance. I reportedly set our house on fire thinking I was smoking out a bush rat from the bush- you can imagine taking my father's house for a bush. I almost burnt my parents alive. It got to a point that I started hurting people; I hurt myself too. It was when I went half-naked and took a journey around town that my people reached a unanimous decision and reined me in. The only available option was to bound me in chains- I became tethered to the wall like a crazy dog"

I could see there were two places in the queue before us. This gave Williams more time. "Everyone had given up on me. I was told that people were just waiting for my final days to happen but on the contrary, I was getting stronger (not healthier) by the day. There was this inadvertent meeting of my mum and an old friend at a friend's place. They started their women talk and my condition got mentioned. My mother's friend asked her if I had been taken to a psychiatric hospital. But my mum never heard of such before. You can't blame her; she lived all her life in the village, a very remote rural town. This was how my redemption happened. I was taken to a psychiatric hospital and within months, I started responding to treatment. With time I healed completely. I had worked around like a mad man for close to 1 year prior to visiting the psychiatric hospital. Anyway, healing happened and gave me back my life."

In closing, he said, "After my discharge from the hospital, I decided to do something meaningful for the rest of my life. By a stroke of luck -than of human effort- a family whose mentally impaired child became friends with me while in the hospital decided to help me. This though was after the story of my recovery must have reached them. They got me involved in their business as an apprentice. I was released and settled 2(two) years after joining them. Today, I am a big player in the textile materials business. I fly to China every quarter to do business and life has really been good"

REFLECTION
The beauty of life is that every human challenge has a life span. As long as one is still breathing, the chances of survival increase by the day. Therefore, the big concern here is how you stay in the battles. If you don't quit, some battles might be lost but your chance of winning the war stays alive.

Life is not about how fast one is able to go; it is about finishing the race with purpose and intent.

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