The way of living man

• You are already on the brink of your life–you only know not.

The Way of the Living Man by Tobias Otieno Ogola is a head on clash with the fantasy of time, preparation and waiting to get the right time. It kills the illusion that life begins later and it is substituted by a more terrestrial truth that it is now and it was always so.

The book is not a comforting one. It is written in disruptive manner.

Laid as a guide to the field rather than a more traditional narrative, the work gives three hundred brief sayings -all of them edges of the blade intended to cut through indecision, justification-making and inactive existence. These are utterances that are points of action. Each demands movement. Each requires sacrifice. Both of them compel the reader to leave the identity of a person who is attempting and embrace the identity of a person who is acting.

The major conflict of the book is resistance. The reader will be supposed to disagree, to protest, to find reasons to prove what he is doing now. This opposition is not an objection, but the object. The uncomfortable thoughts are specifically pointed at the bottom of the reader. The book redefines the emotional resistance as a diagnostic instrument and indicates where one needs to be developed.

The book is divided into ten central areas of change to give the reader a sequence of external and internal development: Delay must be put behind, inner anarchy experienced, discipline and purpose developed, and finally one gets to the point of full expression, which the book calls dying empty. This idea is not the figurative hedonism; it is offered as a quantifiable norm of a full life, in which no opportunity of value is discarded or denied.

The voice is unreachable. It makes the assumption that the reader has lost his interest in theory, or in passive inspiration. It is also somewhat addressed to the man, who is able to observe his own stagnation and is willing to confront it. It denies softness, denies long preparation, and denies the comfort of self-perception which is not coupled with action.

Way of the Living Man is not something that is passively consumed. It is to be used, it is to be scribbled, it is to be re-read, it is to be rubbed in. It places itself in the position of a working manual- something to be carried, worked with, and put to the test in actual life.

It is not a book that everybody can enjoy. It does not strive towards wide appeal. It is addressed to people who experience the burden of the unrealized potential and the time running out.

In its bareness the book is a cold one-liner; you are already on the edge. The next question is, Will you come out–or shall you continue to wait till there is nothing more to come into?