Your Days Are Numbered

Forget that you're not good at mathematics, one way or the other, you've been dealing with figures, numbers and digits all your life.

 

Your journey to life started with two significant figure —your parents. They added up their differences into a whole number that formed you. Delivered weighing 1.3kg, your date of birth is the first number assigned to you after your position in the family— 3rd child. 

 

Two, three, four  birthdays later, you're in school— kindergarten 1 is where you begin to formally learn numbers, how many days make a week, how many weeks make a month, how many months make a year. Here, your journey of a thousand miles had begun with a step.

 

Almost all the proverbs you begin to learn are summed up in numbers. "A stitch in time saves nine" "A bird at hand is worth two in the bush". Those ones don't even bother you. Every morning as the third child you complain of getting the lesser meal and you're told "half a loaf is better than none." You attempt to revolt, again you remember "two wrongs don't make a right." That doesn't even fit your situation but it's one of those things you've learnt. 

 

Growing older you bother more about your position in class and other games of number— winning 100 metres race or winning a lottery. Winning a lottery isn't really the matter you're more concerned about your examination number, because you're sitting for  WASSCE,  GCE, NECO. You're already calculating your grades even before the results are out, but you remember your primary 3 teacher told you sometime around your 3rd term in the class not to count your eggs before their hatched. 

 

You've passed WAEC. You've gotten above 200 in JAMB. Your Post UTME scores added up to about 80%. You're admitted into the university and now you have a matriculation number. Times without number, your parents advise you to figure things out before embarking on them, don't keep bad company, so you don't get rounded up by the police, like numbers and land in jail with a number as long as: OG/N569828555828YB007. 

 

You heeded your parent's advice and graduated with a good CGPA—4.0. Even days when you didn't get three square meals, you managed an apple a day and kept memorising countless things, figuring things out and battling numberless events. You end up with a good job whose annual salary is similar to your phone number, even with a car and a registration number. And you find a lady someday with figure 8, ask her for her digits and home address— I live at number 8 Comevisitme Street. She leaves wondering which number you fall, of all the guys who've asked her out. 

 

You've achieved a number of things, and have become a great family figure. You're not a mere figurehead neither a figure of fun. You're about 65 and by your calculations, "Your days in life are numbered."

 

—Shomade Abdulazeez