THE JUSTIFIED THIEF

I was robbed of my treasure. I pursued and caught up with the thief yet, I could not retrieve my treasure. He squandered it as he fled. I looked straight into his eyes and asked, “Why do this to me? Why steal and squander my treasure?”

He grinned ominously exposing his hidden deadly shark-like dentine. In the next minute his countenance had changed. I could swear I saw lightning in his eyeballs. Then he spoke effusing smoke. Yes, thick dark smoke that burnt my eyes and irritated my ears that I could barely hear.

“How could that be a treasure? You left it unkept and untended like it was unwanted. How on earth could you call that ‘your’ treasure? I didn’t steal your treasure. I only took what wasn’t important to you because to me, it’s a plaything; a toy that gives me delight.” He grinned again. Then in a big puff of dark smoke, he disappeared.

I’m not narrating a nightmare I had. Neither am I relating a true life incidence literally. I’m just  sharing a fiction from my wild imaginations. I know you just asked why anyone in his right mind would imagine himself in such a frightful scenario. That other person reading just prayed, “God forbid evil. May I not be robbed of my treasure (either in Jesus’ name or Insha Allah).”

Well, I’m in my right senses and I don’t wish myself or you, my reader, evil. But all of us are robbed, not one time, but from time to time by this horrible thief in my imagination. He steals the same thing from everyone of us. He treats us the same way – laughing at us after stealing our most valuable treasure as men and women of vision and noble mission.

The greatest enigma about him is that he doesn’t sneak in. He isn’t ever surreptitious. We open the door for him willingly and wittingly allow him to gain grounds. We roll our treasure around before him; kicking and frolicking with it like it means absolutely nothing. We use our treasure like we use rain water at the peak of the rainy season. We throw it to our ‘frenemy’ to play with. We act like a pregnant woman who loaned a barren friend her coital canal.

How more justified can this thief be when eventually he makes away with our treasure? Haven’t we, with our own hands, offered it to him on a platter of folly? Think about it, friend. How readily and willingly we allow procrastination to steal our precious time from us. Yes. Our ‘frenemy’ the thief is PROCRASTINATION and our treasure, our TIME. Don’t the wise say that procrastination is the thief of time? If only procrastination could make a justification case for itself, would we ever be able to prove it wrong? We invite it. We condone it. And it punishes us for our negligence.

Now that you know that procrastination is a wicked, merciless monster that can justifiably rob you of your most valuable treasure, I beseech you, dear friend, to constantly shut it out and jealously guard your treasure as you use it wisely. May your today be better than your yesterday and may your tomorrow always be better than your today.

If you’ve learnt something, then don’t hesitate to teach us something too as you leave a comment.