With my twenty-second birthday on the horizon, it's no surprise that waves of introspection keep disrupting my drive and focus. As Rod Wave would tell you: Get out of your feelings and get in your bag. But I wonder how we can maintain an unflinching concentration on a cause when time is Delilah. With each tick and with everyday that passes by, we get closer to the dread of failing to unbox our full potential, and the melancholy that accompanies the fact that not every individual gets to be successful is always so intense. You can never free your mind from the shackles of dubiety. What if I never get to make it? Damola duly followed up this lyric with "but I will be fine", but in all fairness, most people won't and that's why they would rather toss their morals to the side, if it ensured that they will eventually become successful.

Going through another round of introspection through this writing, I had asked myself what my biggest success so far is and the answer is pretty evident, my pen. With this piece of object, I wield so much power akin to Musashi Miyamoto, who is believed to be the world's strongest Samurai. Make no mistake, I wasn't made to work for this, it was a gift from the realm above. Maybe the fact that I wasn't made to work for this made me complacent and ignorant of the fact that this gift is only just, and I must nurture it if I am ever going to hit the heights of my idol, Ronaldo.

References are the soul of evocative texts. It gives oxygen to an article, figuratively. Bland articles aren't just as catchy. That's enough digression, let's get back to the subtle threats of time.

"Subtle" in the sense that the threat of time starts off casually. You just turned eighteen and it dawned on you that you are no longer a juvenile but then you reckon that you are not even twenty yet and you still get to enjoy the luxury of time. This is time's first threat, albeit subtle.

Then you turn twenty and that comes with even more introspection. You begin to understand the severity of time, followed by asperity towards oneself. You beat yourself up occasionally and urge yourself to try harder. Your aging mother whom you're yet to see blossom further aggravates the deadbeat feeling that has slowly been creeping in and you begin to sulk at your ineptitude. Then you get to twenty five and the threats are no longer subtle, it's fully blown now and desperation sets in. You begin to clutch at illegality in a bid to avert the looming disaster of failure, you stabilize a bit before hitting an iceberg which is death in most cases or the penitentiary. This all arrows down to the threat of time.

However, those who manage to withstand this threat of time and remain grounded oftentimes succeed thanks to their grit, or not, but at least they get to live freely to tell their failed story

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