Scenario planning is not expectation planning but resilience planning.

You are neither expecting the best nor worst-case scenario, but building capacity for an even better or worse scenario.

Because if you can stretch the mind out of its comfort without an external force, you build capacity to soak up external forces you couldn’t have planned for.

None of the scenarios you plan for might come to pass, but the process prepares you for whatever may come.

There’s something almost paradoxical here: the scenarios themselves are disposable, but the capacity they build is permanent.

Incorporate it into anything you think is important. Things can go forward or sideways, but whichever way, be built to adapt and thrive.

– Osasu Oviawe

When life presents a mirror, look into it and accept all you see as you. Incomplete, but still a significant part of you.

Don’t look behind the mirror, seeking who is holding it up, so you can fight them and shatter the mirror.

If you look, you will find your parents, your friends, your family, your acquaintances, your colleagues, your enemies… basically, whoever is holding the mirror is yours, not anybody else’s, but wholly yours.

Blame one, and another will still hold up the same mirror, sooner or later. If you don’t like what you see in a mirror, change it or accept it.

Leave the mirror holder alone.

– Osasu Oviawe

How do you know those who love you?

There are many ways, but let me dwell on one.

They flip the part of you that would typically irritate others into a joke that is so without malice, yet so funny, that it cracks you up.

They get you to see a caricature of yourself not with the scorn that resists change, but with laughter that embraces change.

Scorn locks us in the closet and shields our bad habits from the needed light.
Laughter cracks us open to let the bad habits get sterilized by the light.

Children who love you are great at this.
Colleagues who love you will extend the same courtesy.
A significant other who loves you perfectly times it for effect.

Search your circle and you will find those who love you.

– Osasu Oviawe

No one knows a person like their significant other.

This is why nothing makes us more whole than when a significant other loves and accepts us.

It is hard to love and accept ourselves, considering all we know about ourselves.
To receive such grace from another is a form of kindness we are wont to pay back.

This is why I support the idea of marrying someone who is kind. Not generous or accommodating, but kind. Someone who sees you, embraces you, and allows time for the warmth from that embrace to melt the calluses that the past has etched onto your heart.

On the flip side, nothing shatters a human into unsightly parts like rejection by a significant other. The thing with shattering is that some broken-off parts are never found again. People never really become whole again after it, even if they meet a kind person.

But whole or not, prioritize being a kind person. The world desperately needs it. Your significant other needs it. You need it.

– Osasu Oviawe

All in life is to one end: gratitude.

I choose to carry the end through life’s journey.

Gratitude for the beginning.
Gratitude for the journey since.
Gratitude for the here, now, and being.
Gratitude for the coming.
Gratitude for the ending.

Not because it all held joy, but because the parts that did gave meaning to the parts that didn’t.

All in life is to one end; I carry the end in me.

– Osasu Oviawe

Resolution comes from the Latin root word “resolvĕre.”

“Re” means again or back.
“Solvĕre” means to loosen, untie, free, or dissolve.

So, a resolution literally means to free again.

Of course, the word has evolved into what it is today, but I always find value in understanding the root of words to appreciate their purpose.

Most New Year’s resolutions feel like the wearing of new chains of duties or a tangling in commitments, but that is not the original intent of a resolution.

It is meant to be a look back at the chains from the past year and the charting of a course of untangling in the new year.

A new year does not have to come with new commitments but a breaking of old habits. An unyoking of sorts.

So, this year, instead of a new list of things you want to do, maybe choose one pattern from the past you want to break and be free again.

– Osasu Oviawe

Those low on their luck hit the betting table.

Those high on their luck hit the negotiation table.

Those who have no luck switch between tables.

Those who need no luck are at neither table.

– Osasu Oviawe

Randomness is not chaos; it is destiny.

Who you are born to, where you are born, who you fall in love with, where you die: all random yet defining.

The more we seek a pattern in randomness, the more random life becomes, and we then label it chaos, which has a pattern.

Free will is the finding of meaning in randomness. Meaning is found in the embrace. Embrace is discipleship. Discipleship is love. Love is the sacrifice of patterns for randomness.

Embrace randomness, own destiny.

– Osasu Oviawe

Some things can only be taught by time.

Other things can only be taught by space.

Some things can only be taught by direction.

Other things can only be taught by magnitude.

Few things can only be taught by words.

Most things can only be taught by experience.

– Osasu Oviawe

You are not alone.

Even in your loneliness, you are not alone.

Tell your story and it will attract kindred souls.

There are many that live your story but will not know so until you tell it.

Your story is your network to the world. Tell it.

You are not alone.

– Osasu Oviawe