The Frog of His Well

We live in a world of our own making. A world our minds choose to believe, a reality we construct brick by brick, thought by thought.

Not long ago I found myself in Nairobi on a work trip, selling paper. I carved out two days to visit a bush hide in Shampole, a place so remote it feels like the earth exhales slowly there. And then the news broke. The Middle East had reached a tipping point. War.

My mind was racing. Shipments. Business. The volatility of it all. Getting home safely to my girls who were waiting, and to my wife who had simply had enough of watching me disappear across time zones. There was a lot to sit with.

And then I noticed him.

A Maasai warrior, calm and unhurried, going about his day with the kind of quiet purpose most of us spend years searching for. His job was to take care of us, and he was doing exactly that, with full presence, zero noise. His eyes would light up when he spoke about the animals he was going to show us that evening. That was his world. That was everything.

But the weather had other plans. Clouds rolled in, the rain came down, and the sightings fell flat. While the rest of us were hunched over our phones, tensed about geopolitics and logistics and life, the Maasai was tensed about one thing: that we had not seen enough animals. He felt genuinely bad about it. He walked over and asked what he could do to make it better.

That was the moment it hit me. We are entirely delusional. Not in a broken way, but in a deeply human way. The Maasai lived in his well, and it was a good well. We lived in ours, and called it the real world.
Reality is just the path your mind chooses to walk.

On the same trip, on the flight back, I found myself sitting near a learned Hindu saint. He was on his way home from Nairobi. I am no one to judge anyone, and I say this without judgment, but I observed him closely. The way he prepared for his meal was meticulous: cleaning the tray, offering prayers, presenting the food to his God, and tidying up afterward with the same care. He politely requested a vegetarian meal and asked that those around him avoid meat. I am an eggetarian by habit, but I skipped the egg that evening, not out of obligation or moral duty, but simply because it costs nothing to honour someone else’s peace. If the absence of an egg on my tray gives him a quieter mind on a six hour flight, that is a fair trade.

But watching him, I kept coming back to the same question. Was this understanding, or was this programming? Both can look identical from the outside. His rituals were precise and sincere. Yet I wondered how much of it he had truly examined versus inherited. Not a criticism. Just a quiet observation. Because we are all, in some way, running programmes written by someone else.
Which brings me to the part I keep coming back to.

We can build whatever reality we choose. I spent years fantasising about a version of the future I wanted, only to slowly understand that the future does not arrive by itself. It grows from what you tend to in the present. The people you are introduced to, the lessons wrapped in inconvenient moments, the patterns that keep repeating until you finally pay attention. Life is trying to teach us something at every stage. Every religion, in its own language, is pointing at the same thing.

So this March, as I keep showing up for my body, I am going to try showing up for my mind too. One rep at a time.

Cover image generated using AI for illustrative purposes.