Fola Daniel Adelesi: Tracing Your Own Graph

Today I am looking at life and our journey through it from the perspective of two students who have been given an assignment to just trace a graph on their workbook. The graphs have already been plotted, but in thin and broken lines. How they choose to go about the plotting is what has become a great issue. This is also relevant to us because our lives are like already plotted graphs in thin and broken lines. We only have the responsibility to make the lines real by tracing them.

So you need to imagine a scenario where two students have been told to trace the lines on their graph sheets and make the lines obvious. They do not need to do anything different from what they see. They don’t have to draw their own lines. They just need to trace what has already been drawn.

They each settle down immediately to start working on the graphs. Let’s say the first student is Student A and the other is Student B. Student A takes his graph, looks at it very well, sharpens his pencil and begins to trace the graph. Student B on the other hand takes a look at the graph of Student A even before looking at his own graph. He fell in love with how Student A was tracing his own graph and then looks at his own graph.

By the time student B settles down to start tracing his own graph, he traced a few lines and wondered why his own graph was not going the way Student A’s graph was going. At that point he took another look at the graph of Student A and began to ‘trace’ his own lines just the way Student A was tracing his. He unconsciously began to draw something else that he was seeing rather than just following what he was given.

All human beings were given a graph sheet and we have something drawn on them just before we all started our lives. Our responsibility is just to trace the graph and move on in life. The graph you were given is different from the graph the other person was given. That means you have no reason or no strong reason to look at what the other person is doing. If you ever want to imitate what the other person is doing, your imitation is limited to looking at his strategy. How did he sharpen his pencil? How is he tracing the lines so well and not leaving any out? How is he tracing the graph lines neatly? Those are the only things you can imitate and they are not the main thing. If you now decide to imitate how he draws his on graph then you will have something different from what you were given when the assignment started.

Someone’s graph may go up and down consistently. Another person’s graph may be on the ground for a while and then it picks up. You may also find another person whose graph starts from a high point then it comes down and it starts again.

The up and down points of the graph are significant times in our lives. When things go up we are happy and things are going well. When things go down we are sad. When you look at the graph, it won’t remain at a constant low.

If you then decide to draw your graph like the other person’s graph, it means you are after their own successes and challenges while leaving your own.

You have your own graph and it is well plotted by the master planner. There is nothing you add to it that makes it better. There is nothing you take away from it that makes it easier. The only easy and the better way to do it is to simply follow the thin and broken lines – directions in life – that you have already been given.