Hello Injury Week
The Zambian man spends a month stretching his income across 30-plus days. Those final days of the month when your money is a game of calculus will hit the best of us. Injury week is when one careless expense can be disastrous. Fuel or food? Lunch or transport money. Injury week hides a lesson for us.
Money has a way of making everything alright. When we have it, we’re able to solve problems. Help out where we can, live a fairly decent life. The absence of it can be frustrating. You fail to do the basic things for the people you love; everything becomes an uphill battle.
I tend to think the life of a man is like the cycle of money. How, in one moment, you can have sixty pins and the next, you don’t have enough to buy airtime or data for your phone.
Sometimes we have abundance. Our children are born healthy. We have a couple of degrees or certifications to our name. A supportive partner and a decent salary hit our account every month. Probably sleeping in a house we own.
We can be unmarried and healthy, running a successful business, travelling the world, enjoying a solid circle of friends and a productive network of business associates. Impressive wardrobe, nice car in the garage.
And yet the one thing we can be guaranteed is that life is always changing. Life is essentially a challenge in the passage of time.
We may lose our jobs, a child is born unhealthy, a partner leaves you, we lose somebody we love. Life ultimately goes into injury week for all of us.
The true test is how we respond to setbacks. How we behave when we have to do more with less.
Because, on a long enough timescale, every man enters the injury week of his life. When he runs out of friends to rely on, his health fails, finances take a hit, the marriage struggles or crumbles, he loses loved ones, discovers he’s not the father of his child, the contract is terminated.
During injury week, we make adjustments. What we eat (or go around people’s desks to eat what they packed!), how we commute, watch our spending very closely. We switch into survival mode. We do not break down. We make it until the next payment at work or in business.
Who are we when injury week extends to months or years when things are not going our way? Now, gents, what is life’s equivalent of packing a home cooked meal and carrying it to work, while your colleagues step out for lunch?
Can you withstand the clear loss of love in your marriage or relationship without doing something you’ll regret? Can you make it to the next day after losing your job or business?
We always navigate injury week because we anticipate it every month. Some get so broke we call in sick two days to pay day! July sorted.
But life has its own injury weeks, where we lose the abundance of friends, business, a wife or girlfriend, high profile and paying job and status. We find ourselves with less that we started with and that’s when we must show up for ourselves.
