Namai's Korner

Life Haina Formula [Life has no Formula]

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote ”Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.” I find myself gravitating to this quote in moments where I have to steady my ship….and when I was 20, nothing about my life was making any sense.

If I could have a conversation with my twenty-year-old self, I don’t think I would overwhelm her with grand revelations or a list of mistakes to avoid. I would probably start by giving her a hug, making her a cup of tea [she was still breastfeeding so wine isn’t an option otherwise would have possibly been the best for such a conversation ha-ha] and telling her to stop worrying so much. I would tell her life haina formula.

At twenty, I thought it did.

I believed that if you worked hard, stayed out of trouble, made your parents proud and did all the right things, life would unfold exactly as it should. I had always done well in school. I was the gifted child, the one people had pinned their hopes on. There was an expectation that my story would follow a particular script.

By the time I turned twenty, though, I was holding my son and trying to make sense of a life that no longer resembled the one I had imagined as I was told it should be.

He was growing his first teeth then. I remember looking at him and laughing because with those two tiny front teeth poking through, he looked exactly like a little rabbit. Even now, when I think of that season, that is one of the first images that comes to mind.

What I remember just as vividly are the emotions I carried alongside that joy.

I had become a source of disappointment to people I loved. Having a child out of wedlock brought shame to my family at the time. My parents struggled to understand how their daughter—the one who was supposed to have so much promise—had found herself in this position. The church I had grown up in asked me to leave because I was considered a bad example to the other young women.

At twenty, I thought those experiences would define me forever.

I worried constantly. I worried that I had ruined my future before it had even begun. I worried that I had let everyone down. I worried that this chapter would become my entire story.

Years later, I came across a quote by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks that captured something I had lived long before I had the words for it:

“I operate on the world by touching the other, by transforming the other, by being transformed by the other.”

At twenty, I hadn’t read Fanon. I was simply trying to raise a baby.

I thought motherhood was about shaping another human being. What I didn’t realise was that my son was shaping me too.

Beyond his angelic eyes, his laughter and that rabbit-toothed smile, it was watching him grow that transformed me. He never really crawled. Instead, he decided he was going to walk. He would pull himself up, wobble uncertainly, take a step and tumble to the ground.

Then he would get up and try again.

And again.

He never interpreted falling as failure. It was simply part of learning.

Watching him taught me something I desperately needed to learn myself: failure isn’t final. Falling down doesn’t mean you stop trying. Sometimes it is simply evidence that you are learning how to move through the world.

Slowly, I began to get up too.

I dusted myself off and started again.

I returned to basketball, often taking my son with me to training sessions and breastfeeding between drills. Looking back now, I realise I wasn’t just rediscovering a sport I loved. I was reclaiming pieces of myself I thought I had lost.

Those days at the basketball court became the beginning of another chapter—one that would eventually shape my career, my ambitions and the woman I would become.

That is another story altogether.

But if I could sit with my twenty-year-old self today, I would tell her not to be so afraid.

Take everything in stride.

Be gentler with yourself.

Hold that rabbit-toothed baby close.

The life you are grieving isn’t the only life available to you.

Life has no formula. The chapters you never planned for are not always detours. Sometimes they are the path itself.

And one day, you will look back and realise that the little boy you thought you were teaching how to navigate the world had quietly taught you how to begin again.