The panic
In recent years, in a country like Nigeria, the news cycle has been swamped with numerous distressing headlines like multiple mass-kidnapping, Biafra agitation, revolution Now, Niger-delta militancy, killer Herdsmen, banditry, the Boko-Haram insurgency and more. Covid19 headlines and the hash tag EndSARs did take over the entire airwaves and social media. From increasing cases of the pandemic to raising death toll at the Lekki-tollgate, while such stories had been critical to public awareness and sentiment, Nigerians were already confused and disintegrated.
It is a common saying that the world feels like it is coming to an when you are in Nigeria, the emergence of COVID19 in the country at the early quarter of 2020 did not make things any better, news flew around from different quarters, there were theories of conspiracy by Elite to use the new 5G network to wipe out a significant proportion of the human race, that caused a lot of panic and unnecessary arguments among citizens. Mind you that as at the end of the first quarter of 2020 there were neither any confirmed usage of the said 5G network anywhere in Nigeria. The government did not immediately respond to that controversy, rather the people were left to wallow in their speculations and fear of the unknown.
A couple of weeks later came the last straw; the lockdown. When a nationwide lockdown was first announced, many did not know what to make of it because it was unprecedented, such as had never been experienced in the country, most people got to spend a lot of time with their families. But then, businesses began to fold, people lost their jobs, local authorities found an excuse to make life more miserable for the locals, in fact it did actually feel like it was the end of days to emphatically state, everything came crashing, the level of panic was alarming. This was when for me the real damage occurred.
Diligence in panic
You hear about pestilence, violence, insecurity and ungovernable space in your society and how the government is doing very little to sanitize these situations. At some point, an incident occurs in your region involving unknown gun men and there is panic. You are charged to be cautious, defend your territory and so on. Receiving this news, suddenly your receptor cells send impulses to your nerve, which sends an urgent wave of distress to your brain to be on the alert, and therefore, at every little disturbance or loud noise outside, you quiver and you rush to the window to see, your flight hormones are triggered. The sad thing is that your health silently suffers consequences of those episodes, whenever you instantly act upon those distressing thoughts and impulses, your health suffers when anxiety sets in, along with it trouble with sleeping and other indicators, sequel to that, health starts to deteriorate opening gateway to all kinds of risk factors.
Only when we begin to realize the negative effect of these external influences on our well being, shall we know the importance of seeing, reading and listening to what is important, when it is important and to the right degree, rather than letting things go to a fever pitch of panic and urgency. This calls for diligence on the part of the individual to control and discipline their thoughts. In Proverbs 4:23, the bible in this light admonishes us to keep our hearts with all diligence; that for out of it arises the issues of life.
Just as a man must learn a trade in order to be successful in that trade, so does a man need to learn the principle of diligence in the guarding the mind, because whether we like it or not the news of this world or rather the assaults of this world will never seize, the struggle is to guard our mind diligently as it processes received information, from whence arises the issues of life. After all the intention of the media is not to cause panic but to inform and create awareness of the latest news around the world. If that be the case, then one begins to wonder if the joke is on the mind, which surges out of control at the reception of most news from the media.
The tyranny of the urgent
Drawing on Charles Hummel’s postulation in describing the life of highly effective people, introduces the phrase “tyranny of the urgent”, it distinguishes between what is urgent on one hand and on the other what is important. Most times we misplace our priorities in our daily lives, we tend to pursue less important things which may seem urgent but they become a problem. Things like waking up first thing in the morning to check the latest news on your tablet or to turn on the TV to see the live broadcast of a riot happening thousands of miles away from you, become very urgent matters for us, whereas we forget to do things that may not seem as urgent, but are important, things like doing morning devotion and committing your live into the hands of its creator.
The simple maxim of doing first things first allows you to rigorously prioritize your activities so the importance things are taken care of first while others are dealt with accordingly. We can watch the news, but it should be at the right time and to the right degree. We can apportion time for watching or reading the news, say thirty minutes every morning or evening or at whatever time we decide. It also does not have to be a do or die affair, it is okay not to watch or read the news the whole day, we can give ourselves a break from consuming so much news especially when it begins to negatively affect us, but how do you know that you are being negatively affected? In the subsequent chapters we will look closely at some of the warning signs of such effect.
Again, let us leverage on Hummel’s tyranny of the urgent to help us understand which things are important, simply by classifying or categorizing activities into dimensions: important and urgent. This gives us a 2x2 matrix with four quadrants. In the first quadrant, we have tasks that are important and urgent like crisis and emergencies, say your child is critically ill and needs to be hospitalized. In quadrant two, we have tasks that are important but not urgent, like saying your morning and night prayers. The third quadrant involves tasks that are urgent but not important, like grabbing your phone during work hours to call friend to confirm a terrorist attack in their state. The last quadrant contains neither important nor urgent tasks, a complete waste of time. When you think about it, you will understand that when you work enough in quadrant two you will find fewer crises in quadrant one but let us not drift further away from our subject.
The subject of guarding our minds against external influence has not only become a matter of urgency but also that of importance. It is imperative that we be conscious of what news we watch, listen to or read, if it is the sort of news that will destabilize our inner peace then it best left alone. There is nothing new under the sun, there has always been troubling news way before we were born and there always will be when we leave this world. There is a need for you to mind gate what content you allow into your mind, as a matter of urgency, immediately you notice any form of negative vibes, be mindful enough to recognize it, stop and unplug at once!. The consequences of failing to unplug may or may not be immediate but most times are irreversible when the damage is done, we will look at this in two perspectives, the spiritual perspective which will be discussed in the last chapter of this book and health perspective, which we can now divulge in the next chapter.