Grandma told me the eyes is always afraid.

In my ethnic Igbo language , we say “Anya wú onyē ûjō!”. When translated to English, it is roughly said as “the eyes is always afraid” or “the eyes is always scared”.
The derivation of using ‘is‘ as opposed to ‘are‘ is simply because we see both eyes as one, as a singular; though they are two.

This is one of the deepest internal motivations anyone can inculcate in their life, and it’s a core variation of the law of compounding effect.

Grandma told me this the first time she managed to drag me to the farm in our village, our own assigned plot for the farming season. I think it was about two and half plot of lands for our cassava and maize farming that year, in the 90’s. When we reached, and i saw the piece of farm we will be working on, i told Grandma its too much, and that she should hire labourers like she used to do in the past to cultivate her farmlands. That was when she told me that the eyes is always afraid. Needless to say, we went on to finish cultivating the land between the two of us with corn and cassava. She was in her late 70’s, i was just 7yrs old.

On a casual look, one may think that she literally meant the eyes, but no. She was actually talking about the entire person as a whole, the eyes is just an extension of the brain.
At first, when we come upon something, it usually seems very big, unlikely and that we cannot do it. She made me understand that that’s just what the eyes do, become afraid at things for no just reason. When you want to enter school, you start imagining when you will graduate and if it is not a very long time. But, the moment you enter, and before you could say jack, you are through and out.

At first, things always seem like they’re impossible, like you can’t do them or that it is going to take a lot of time to complete. Do not succumb to this prompts, it’s just the eyes playing tricks on your experiences and fears.

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