I hope you had a merry Christmas and may I take this opportunity to wish you a happy and prosperous 2014.January is hardly a popular month. You can’t help but sympathise with it. Coming after celebration laden December, complete with the Christmas cheer, it reminds us of our mortality and limitations; brings us down to earth.It is also the time when old bills must be cleared and new ones paid up, be it school fees, rent, rates and taxes…it is all about bills, bills, bills.January is also the time we make New Year resolutions. We promise ourselves to be better human beings in all aspects. Too often than not the resolutions do not survive January, leave alone the whole year. Mostly this is because resolution making is a cyclic unproductive activity for most people. It is dictated more by circumstances than by some genuine desire for improvement.We are creatures of habit. Having a calendar is both a testimony and an enforcer of this fact. The comic movie ‘Gods Must be crazy’ pithily brings this out to the fore.The Khoi khoi (the subject of the movie) live in another world where it is neither Monday nor Thursday and it can be whatever time you want it to be. All they care about is that it is day or night. They go about their duties hunting, gathering and digging up roots and tubers rather contentedly.The lesson one gets after so many laughs that the movie elicits is that you can make rules in your life and do very well. As a matter of fact, it is imperative that each of us does.This is not to say that we each should re-invent the calendar. The Roman one will do just fine. But we have got to tweak it a little bit. It should suit our purposes and not the other way round. It’s more like appreciating the tide and swimming along to make it suit your purposes.There is something curious about ‘development’ as we know it today. People in places of extreme weather conditions seem to have mastered their environment and become technologically and economically better off than these in fair and pleasant environments.I have a theory for this. It is, at first, a product of necessity more than anything else. If you do not work hard in summer, spring and fall, you are dead in winter. You could die of hunger or cold or both.Thus the self preservation instinct pushes you to properly prepare for these conditions and eventually master them.Habit later kicks in and your progeny are taught this as they grow up. A conditioning of environment, education and habit ensures survival and growth.This is in stark contrast to places like Africa which have pleasant environmental conditions. The minimal seasonal shifts have affected our work ethic. There are no considerably adverse consequences to laziness compared to, say, Iceland. This has over time made us not have the ‘proper’ motivation. It has also made us poor and weak.To progress, therefore, we must create our own ‘rules of engagement’ with our environment. We must take charge and attempt as much as possible to ‘bend’ our environment to our wills, collective and individual.Those wills, hopes, dreams, desires cannot be effectively set and realised in a year; not on a grand scale anyway. We must begin to have long-term ambitions and plans. Yearly reviews of the same will be nice but they should not be of the cyclic and repetitive sort that we have now.Whichever way you look at it; the key issues (singularly and jointly) are where are we now? Where have we come from? Where do we want to go? And how will we get there?We must stop being mere products of our environment; we must actively engage time and space. Not everything is a given!PS: My heart goes out to the good peoples of South Sudan and Central African Republic. May 2014 bring them peace, security and hope. And may they be spared opportunists posing as leaders.The writer is an entrepreneurship development consultant based in Kigali.
