Thrills And Chills: Readers' favourite quotes.

Going through life is trudging through the possibilities of pain and bliss, of hurt and mirth, of thrills and chills.

-Boniface Sagini

Life is like a rugby ball you never know where it bounces next.

-Boniface Sagini

Life is not so bad after all when you can breathe.

-Boniface Sagini.

Life is not so bad after all when you can breathe. -Boniface Sagini

Going through life is trudging through the possibilities of pain and bliss, of hurt and mirth of thrills and chills. - Boniface Sagini

Preface To Thrills And Chills: Trudging Through Life.

PREFACE

This world is hectic.

Derrick was born about 40 years ago to, as he himself avers, ‘a very wealthy family’. He had a good start in life. His parents could provide almost everything and anything he ever needed. To top it off he had uncommonly good brains. He was a brilliant student in school. He was privileged indeed from all sides and ostensibly nothing could prevent him from reaching the acme of success in life. He had the oomph. He had a well-heeled family behind him. So he was destined for great things.

 He graduated from high school and went on to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He even did a Master’s in the same area of study. And he started degusting the pleasure his work had reaped. He says: ‘I had money, friends and a good job.” But little did he know tragedy was brewing. He didn’t know an unfortunate incident wcould suddenly come and change his life forever. Sadly, he was involved in a deadly car crash that got him paralyzed. He sustained third degree burns on something about 80% of his body. He was bed-ridden for one and a half years and would live on a wheel chair the rest of his life. Now he can’t do his contractor’s work anymore. He’s disfigured, lonely and miserable. He smokes two packs of cigarette a day and he just wants to die... from lung cancer.

Or get the story of Allan Edgar Poe who had odds heavily stacked against him the whole of his life. This is a review of his biography: “Tragedy visited him early and often, [and] did nothing to thicken an already abnormally thin skin.” He loved and lost an endless string of women, beginning with his mother, who died when he was 2. The love of his adolescent life — an older woman, the mother of a schoolmate — “died insane” when he was 15.........An unsurprisingly macabre teen, Poe spent much of his time at her grave." -TIME magazine, a 1934 issue. When Poe finally decided to get married his fiancée got engaged to someone else while he went to school at the University of Virginia. He eventually got married at age 27 to a thirteen year oldthirteen-year-old cousin who unfortunately suffered from tuberculosis and breathed her last. 

Ouch!!

Plainly, he (Poe) was a troubled man who lived a cheerless, stinging life. He suffered egregiously. But he earned himself a glamorous title as a giant fiction writer, something we remember him for. 

Here above are life stories that describe in a nutshell the maelstrom some people are going through and just how life can hurt so badly sometimes. They insinuate the 'thrills and chills’, the pain and bliss, the up-and-down moments of life. They are tales of woe, tales of bad circumstance each one of us can relate to or have even found ourselves in.

Looking at my own life at 19, I have fought stern battles. I have been hounded and wounded a little. I have asked pointed questions about life. Sometimes, the thought of the future frightens me. There’s angst, there is fear, there is anxiety. There are moments when I feel empty and discouraged weighed down by worry and defeat. I have hinted this in the book.

I know you share somewhat a similar experience with me because after all we live the same life. And like me you could be feeling life is such a rollercoaster and a real bummer. Yea, it can be. But we can always make it an enthralling and worthy experience. 

 Life’s full of annoying inconveniences, bristling threats, heartbreaking losses and disgusting occurrences, even people. But there is little, if any, we can do to change the nature of this bitter-sweet, unsparing experience called life. It has always been that way and will always be that way. Even so we are not completely powerless. We can gradually turn life’s obstacles around, achieve greatness, stay upbeat in our down times and show up for our stricken brothers and sisters and lend our ears to these dispirited souls hitting a rough patch because we will need someone by our side during our cloudy days, too.

 It is for this reason I got myself scrawling down drafts on paper to encourage people-and even myself- to outgrow bad circumstance. This quote here goaded me in the entire process of writing this little, lilting muse which I believe will give hope and cheer to souls that become occasionally disheartened  and who want to get something out of life.

"What men need most in this world's struggle and strife is not usually direct help, but cheer. . . .. . .. Many men have fainted and succumbed in the great struggles whom one word of cheer would have made strong to overcome. We should never, then, lose an opportunity to say an inspiring word. We know not how much it is needed, or how great and far-reaching its consequences may be."- "Week-Day Religion," by J. R. Miller, page 170.

So the rationale of having written this book is to 'say an inspiring word' to a lot of people who are hurting, crying and sounding defeatist, an inspiring word to millions of people who are living in pain and indigence. I wrote it for a young chap who hopes there is no life after death so that he can finally rest, for a dejected ailing woman who thinks God enjoys torturing her and for some hopeless lad who threatens his friends he'd shoot himself. I wrote it for them and for myself.

 I can’t finish without saying- life is bleaker than ever. Here is why? "The rate of serious clinical depression has more than tripled over the last two generations, and increased by perhaps a factor of ten from 1900 to 2000." We have to accept we are more vulnerable today than our sturdy primitive progenitors were. Although life is easier now, it is replete with temptations, dangers, certain cravings and whatnot our forbearers didn’t have to face and that are very likely to induce stress and possibly depression by extension. We have to get proper mental ammunition as we trudge through life. That ammunition is this book. It’s a constant reminder of how truly amazing life is and a source of cheer at those times you're feeling down for some reason.

This book may not take away the sting in your particular circumstance but from it you will certainly get a good vibe: little, lilting words of cheer and that's what really matters when you are hitting a rough patch.

Welcome, read and get inspired.

The author.

RENASCENCE

"Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever."
Psalms 136:1

Firstly, I will say I'm deeply introverted. I don't like stuff about my life flying about and people making a fuse outta it. People can be horrible, you know. But this tale is a tad different in the sense that it is a testimony and testimonies are not meant to be kept. They are meant to be told.

Mark 5:19 - "Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had on thee."

Now, It has been known in a relatively big circle that I have had 'problems with my eyes'. My glasses are a testament to that. But my close friends know it's not just 'problems with my eyes'. They have known that my eyes ache badly- and deplorably, problematically, notoriously badly so.

But it's been more complex than that. I have experienced for 5 fraught years multiple inexplicable symptoms: itching skin upon exposure to the sun, photophobia, allergic conjunctivitis, fatigue, eye pain, neck pain, back ache, loss of appetite, poor vision, fever, tooth ache, facial pain, falling hair and even occular hypertension (abnormal eye pressure)- almost all of them . All this time I have been trying to treat these symptoms to no avail. The number of times I have gone to hospitals is ridiculously huge. I remember at one time a box of batches of tablets that was prescribed to me, a box the size of the box of bata shoes. Damn!! And lately I went for a CT scan, exposed my self to noucous radiation, to find if there is a problem in my head. Awful, right?

I don't know what kind of sickness this is. It's not Malaria, it's not typhoid, it's not Ebola. It's not a definitive kind of disease. What has been prominent though is the eye pain , clinically known as chronic eye pain. I have always thought the other symptoms were its appendages , that the neck and back pain extended from it. I don't know whether I'm right here or not. I have suffered an egregious pain.I m not putting a stretch to it. I have suffered for real. I could cry sometimes. This mysterious disease has taken its toll me on me. Life has dealt me it's bad hand; excoriated, reduced me piece by piece in a way somebody who's not me can not fully comprehend. image Firstly, my academic life. I was born a precocious kid. And for most of my life I have been ranked in top positions in class. But when all this started the graph on my transcript started to dip and I could not do anything about it. The pain I experienced was damaging and almost crippling. Reading become utterly strenuous (until lately) and sometimes even impossible. In my form 4, I read virtually nothing the year long. I slept or flipped through magazines ,or just pretended to read and shouted 'shut up '-being the class prefect -during morning and evening preps. Sometimes I sneaked to go and sleep. ( I was never caught. I just don't get how ).And during classes I would not concentrate. Long way after the syllabus was done I was still grappling with the first topics and actually I never did the whole syllabus but I sat for KCSE which I flopped (but not the way you can think) yet I'm no dimwit. I barely read the set books... Secondly, my social and spiritual life. This nagging, hardworking pain changed my social life also. I become unusually silent and withdrawn. I become loggy and grouchy. I also become a blithering idiot. My spiritual life also went faltering.

BUT THINGS HAVE CHANGED JUST AS MYSTERIOUSLY.

I'm overexcited or perhaps rhapsodical about my renascence. I mean I have never felt this way for such along time. It's my fifth day feeling whole again, after what seemed like a lifetime of dreariness, pain and torment. It's hard to be believe I can wake up without squinted eyes, without duels with light that made me feel like 'passing out', without notorious back , eye, tooth and facial pain. And also this is the fifth day I have had real sleep. Right now I'm on medication of a godsend wonder drug. Let me explain. In our church-I'm a Seventh Day Adventist-we believe in medical missionary work ,that is, using naturopathic means to heal maladies: use of simples juices and vegetables, hot water baths etc Now last week after church I bought a strange reddish brown powder from a medical missionary. He is a professional doctor but he deals in this sort of unlikely medicine, now which is the ideal medicine. To him I explained my symptoms: the eye pain, the back, neck, tooth pain. He just told me those are allergies, allergies simple as that! And then he prescribed the wonder drug; 'One tea spoon in a glass of very hot water, cover for 20 minutes ×2 daily, morning and evening.' You know I have gone to hospitals, many of them, but no doctor really diagnosed my problem. In fact they told me I'm not allergic. I'm recuperating. And this healing can not be called anything else. It's a miracle. Thank you God for this miracle. You had a reason for my pain and you know why it had to be me. It is your handiwork. I will never forget!!