The road was old. Not neglected old. Settled old. The kind of tarmac that has seen seasons come and go. The kind that has quietly carried diplomats, school buses, gardeners, delivery trucks, and evening joggers for years without ever demanding attention. Here and there, patches marked previous repairs, but the road still held itself together with quiet dignity. I walked even slower as I realised this is not an ambience I would want to leave soon. Somewhere in the distance, a lawnmower hummed. Not loudly, just enough to remind you that someone, somewhere, considered grass worth trimming on a Tuesday morning. Birds chirped from indigenous trees whose trunks were older than many of the houses around them. The Jacaranda trees just looking normal, you know before the season that we would be busy snapping at them and hash tagging them #JacarandaPropaganda. Twitter was good back in the day. The air felt different. Not cleaner necessarily. Just calmer. Less hurried.
To my left stood a gate that looked expensive without trying to prove it. Behind it, I was told, lived a former Cabinet minister. A little further down, on the opposite side, stood another home belonging to the daughter of a former president. A few meters later, another neighbour was pointed out. A governor from a county hundreds of kilometres away. Across the road, another property was undergoing renovations. New stonework. Fresh paint. The unmistakable sound of money continuing its conversation with itself. As I walked, I found myself asking a question that has probably followed humanity since the first palace was built beside the first hut. How did they get here? I mean, the people, how did the Nobility and the Haute Bourgeoisie get to be H. bourgie or noble? Was it wealth? Was it wisdom? Was it hard work? Was it connections? Was it favour? Or was it some mysterious combination of all of them?
The truth is, from outside the gate, you can never really tell. You can see the house, but cannot see the sacrifices, you can admire the garden, but you cannot see the decades. You can estimate the value of the property, but you cannot calculate the cost of the journey. Yet there was something undeniably beautiful about it all. Not just the houses, the atmosphere is always different, the abundance, the silence. The evidence that somewhere along the way, somebody imagined something bigger and then built it.
The gardens particularly fascinated me. Some of the road reserves were larger than entire residential plots in other parts of the city. At one point, I realised that the stretch of green between the road and a perimeter fence was probably bigger than the piece of land on which my own home stands, and I do not live in a small house. The thought of it made me laugh. Not out of envy, but out of the awkwardness of the perspective presenting itself right infront of my eyes. God has provided everything to me that pertains to life and godliness and I am not complaining. Seeing things different helps alot. Exposure has a way of expanding the mind. Sometimes the greatest gift is not money, it could be simply seeing what is possible. Living the life of posibility. I mean the dream to fly took me on a lifetime adventure.
The city of Nairobi is remarkable in this regard. In that, in thirty minutes, you can move from streets where somebody is arguing with a neighbour over drainage water to avenues where silence itself appears to have a homeowners’ association. In one neighbourhood, a boda boda rider misses your ankle by three centimetres. In another, the loudest disturbance is a gardener trimming a hedge. In one estate, people are throwing garbage everywhere. In another, people are discussing which species of tree best attracts a particular rare bird. It is the same city. Yet sometimes it feels like different countries. Many people look at affluent neighbourhoods and immediately focus on the restrictions, the security checks, the controlled access, the rules, the regulations. But after spending time walking through these leafy suburbs, I began to understand something. Order is often the invisible architecture of peace. The absence of chaos is rarely accidental. It is usually designed, maintained, protected, funded – sometimes, and agreed upon.
The neat hedges did not trim themselves. The roads did not repair themselves. Some are atually in disrepair, and in a bad state. But the ambience still remains. What is a bad road to a good comfy car anyway? The trees did not preserve themselves. Someone cared enough to make it happen. And someone else cared enough to sustain it. That is not merely wealth. That is stewardship. There is a difference. Wealth buys a mansion, but stewardship preserves it, stewardship builds and preserves a neighbourhood. Wealth builds a gate, but stewardship and friendship cultivates a community. Wealth acquires land, but stewardship creates an environment where people flourish, neighbourhoods that turn out to be communities.
As I continued walking, I found myself thanking God. Not because I owned any of the houses. Not because I knew any of the people behind the walls. But because I am convinced it is healthy to occasionally witness excellence, constantly expose yourself to higher levels of excellence. It is healthy to see beauty, healthy to experience order, healthy to encounter evidence that human beings can still build things that are elegant, peaceful, and enduring. Too often, we spend our days consuming noise. Bad news, political outrage, social media arguments, hate, crime reports, complaints. Scandals! ah! – Tea gangs & the Gossipers Fellowship, hello! The soul begins to shrink when it is fed exclusively on disorder. Sometimes it needs a walk through another reality. A reminder that cleanliness exists. That beauty exists. That peace exists. That excellence exists. That abundance exists. Not to provoke jealousy. To inspire possibility. Perhaps that is one of God’s quiet mercies. He occasionally allows us to see further than where we currently stand. Not to make us resent our present circumstances. But to enlarge our vision. To remind us that there are still higher mountains, greener valleys, better ideas, wiser decisions, and greater levels of stewardship available ahead. The goal is not necessarily to live in the same neighbourhood as a minister, a governor, or a former president’s family.
The goal is to become the kind of person capable of managing whatever measure of influence, responsibility, wealth, and peace God entrusts to you. Because true prosperity is not merely having a large house. It is having a large enough soul to steward that large house well. Perhaps that was the greatest lesson from the walk. Not that some people have more. But that there is more; more beauty, more order, more peace, more possibility, more life.
Sometimes all it takes to discover it, is to relax and let your mind see the positivity within the frustrating mindspaces we encounter on a daily. For instance trying to help a motorbike rider to navigate a clearly marked neighbourhood… With an online map in his pocket. See the need for positivity?