When we were children, my parents put us in private school even though it was really difficult for my father to bear the financial cost. But he did it for two reasons; a) because he wanted us to have the best, b)he wanted us to have an education in English in case one day we packed our bags and went back to Kenya. Reason (b) was a sorta clever plan because we know people who were put through public schools in Saudi Arabia and then they had to move to Kenya and go back several classes because they couldn’t speak in English.
One disadvantage of being put through the private system of education is more often than not, our classmates were children of rich families when we were in the middle-lower class at the time. They had better toys, brand clothes, higher allowances, went for better vacations…and in the mind of a child, you really can’t pretend that all those things did not matter because all those things did matter. I went through that complex in high school, and my younger brother carried it over even through university. Once I was telling him, “Don’t look at the people above you but at the people below you,” and he answered, “What if everybody around you is above you?”
I remember this particular incident that happened when I was a kid. But I went to my friend’s house and I saw her barbie collection and I remember wishing I had all that. To romantacize a bit, my mother had made me a rag doll out of left-over materials during one of the summers. And it didn’t look anything close to Barbie. I also saw a picture of her and her family in Disney world and boy was I envious. But then a few years later, she lost her younger brother, and I no longer wished I had her life. Today’s question is, if you’re wishing for somebody else’s life, are you ready to take the bad things with the good?
The answer is, both ways you can’t have somebody else’s life so might as well be satisfied with your own.
