If there's something I came to understand a long time ago, it is that sometimes, it takes a bad thing to happen to force out a good thing, and I have a story where a situation like that happened to me.
photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra
The first one was about five years ago or thereabout. At the time, as a young broke student, I didn't have any money to buy a gas cylinder for myself, but I was lucky enough to have had a neighbor who had two gas cylinders and had agreed to lend me one.
I had spent the next six months comfortably making use of his gas cylinder, up to the extent where I had completely forgotten that it wasn't even mine to begin with, until the day he came knocking on my door. He had told me that his little sister had gotten into school and he needed to give her his gas cylinder, so he had come knocking to collect the one with me.
When he gave me the news, it immediately made me feel some kind of way, but I also knew that the gas cylinder wasn't mine and that a day like that was coming, so I had done the only thing I could do; I had gone inside and handed his gas cylinder to him.
That was probably the longest week of my student life because for that entire week, I found myself going from one neighbor to another, asking them to lend me their gas cylinder so that I could cook with it. I even went as far as paying some of them for it, but after about a week, I had gathered enough money to buy my own gas cylinder.
And every time I think about that situation, I can't help but feel like if that neighbor hadn't taken his gas cylinder back, I probably wouldn't have gotten mine.
But you see, in as much as that story ended well, it's not really a good thing that something bad has to happen first before something good happens. I know for a fact that I would have felt ten times happier if I had earlier returned his gas cylinder to him and not waited until he needed it to give it to him.
I guess another lesson that whole experience taught me was that sometimes, we tend to be comfortable when we find temporary solutions to permanent problems, because I knew I would always need a gas cylinder and that my solution to it at that moment was only temporary.