And our hand phones have suddenly become our life

“And it is He (the Almighty who created) horses, mules, and donkeys, for you to ride and use for show; and He has created (other) things of which ye have no knowledge” – so says the Almighty in Quran 16: 8.

Here reference to these animals are for both literal and metaphorical purposes. Yes. Of entities in creation that He has created, hardly can it be controverted that He the Almighty is the Creator, the sole-Proprietor, the sole Nourisher and Protector of all entities in the phenomena. What strikes me in the above ayat however is not that which is known of His creation, but that which is unknown.  I am fascinated by His reference to the existence of entities that were hitherto unknown; I am awed by His declaration that His capacity to create new entities shall remain in the present and future tenses. He shall continue to create ‘stuffs’ that we do not know.

When carefully contemplated, it is arguable that the tools for technological advancement in our world today, the new discoveries in the sciences, the headways that humanity has recorded all of which have made life both easy and complicated are products of elements in creation that were hitherto unknown. One of them is the hand phone or cellphone in your hand. Like the magical ring, the hand phone has become not only indispensable but also another source, and quite ironically, of tragedy and emotional trauma.

He is in Junior Secondary School one in a public school in Lagos. He is the third child. His other siblings are four. His father is a former student of mine and now a younger colleague in another university. Face to face with the challenges of life and living in a city on its path to postmodernity, and in order to track the movements of his beloved young boy particularly at a time when everybody is either a kidnapper or the kidnapped, his father decided to buy a small hand-phone which cost around ten thousand naira for him. He was given the strict instruction that he should not use the phone for any other purpose but to track the movement of his fellow siblings and school-mates with whom he goes to and returns from school every day. Such was the instruction given to the young boy a couple of weeks ago when the school term began. It was like the instruction given by the Almighty during the primordial times to Prophet Adam and his wife never to go near “this tree”. Brethren, I have since realized that the sweetest fruit to human beings is that which is forbidden; sometimes people plunge into their death in the pursuit of the unattainable.

Now when my younger colleague gave that phone out to his young son that day, the same way I gave my young boy and girl their hand-phones a couple of years ago, little did we realize that much as phones had become existential necessities for the young and the old, those magical devices are capable of many other things we could not have imagined; things “analog parents’ that we were would never imagine are possible. In other words, the hand-phone in the hands of our young children nowadays serves as a compass to the world. Hand-phones deprive the children of their innocence, of their guiltlessness.

On the day the son of my younger colleague received the hand-phone, he felt a sense of authority and freedom. He felt the presence of the world. He thought he was now in control of the world. For days thereafter things went well; until that day; until a couple of weeks thereafter. One morning, he left home as usual and headed to join his school mates. However in-between his home and the school, he realized that his phone had either been stolen or dropped from his bag pocket without his knowledge. Suddenly, the thought occurred to him that the phone was his life; that his life had been stolen. “If I do not find my phone, I would not go home”, he told himself. He looked everywhere in the school premises for the phone without success.  After school hours, he stayed behind. He refused to join others for the homeward journey. His phone had become his life.

Indeed, our phones have become our life, our bank, our diary, our secrets and our life. If there is another addiction out there that no knows no gender or class, it is the seemingly incurable magic that hand phones have become. But the solution to this addition is simple: self-discipline. The solution lies in our ability to constantly bear this in mind that if it is from this world, it is going to be for this world.