Farrar

Town Planning

[Moriö @moriostaT]

Your boyfriend every time he goes to see his kids 😭

[Jentezen Franklin @Jentezen]

You might face a trial, but you don’t have to face it in fear. Faith still makes room for God to move.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

@NyachihiDorcas @amenya_nelson Cabro is actually better in my opinion…..
We throw trash everywhere and the drains are clogged. Notice how after the downpour you will see washed up debris on the road surface…..

[African @ali_naka]

Moroccan ball boys tried to steal Edouard Mendy’s towel until a Senegalese player stopped them…

Key lesson to Africans,

If dealing with an unfair situation

You MUST ACT, not online rants or Prayers

We must learn from Senegal

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

Check out Watch FWWJ's video! #TikTok https://t.co/fOJN0OiI0C

[Eric @amerix]

That injection is painful.

Don't kick a man when he is down.

Inject with honour, bana!

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

Check out BuildingMinds's video! #TikTok https://t.co/4bqcpVNDeq

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

@EvansChune1 Instant follow.......
I like the idea that our ambitions are unlimited.

[Amakanji Thomas @AmakanjiThomas]

Daudi Chepkwony from Kericho deep words about Raila Odinga is touching, his tears means a lot to especially Raila's orphans. Rest in peace Baba. 😔

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

@KenyaRailways_ what happened to the morning train to Central Station via Imara Daima?

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

@FrankAkiba060 @WelBeast 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

Check out my latest article: From Asphalt to Algorithms : Rethinking Urban Mobility https://t.co/0lOFViOGJm via @LinkedIn

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

https://t.co/wbcqaqJj1G

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

As a man, things that are likely to wreck your life are likely to come later in life. Your late 30s or 40s. Even in your 50s and 60s, things can irrevocably go wrong.

Some of the rudderless, dysfunctional male folks in their late 30s and 40s, that I know, were the most ruthlessly focused, most ambitious guys who had everything going for them barely 12 years ago: beautiful wife, famil, job, business, climbing that social ladder with absolute certainty of conquering the world. They were unstoppable. They were untouchable.

Then something happened.
They lost an election.
A regime changed and they lost all the deals.
A divorce.
Lost a job or a business deal.
Or their practice licence got revoked.
Some gambled their fortune away, never recovered.
Lost a key person in their life-parent, sibling, friend, or whoever held it down for them when the going got tough.

The sad thing about their situation is that you can never prepare for a divorce, a job loss, a licence revocation, or whatever that is likely to send your life into a tailspin, with no room of recovery.

You can end up homeless.
You can be auctioned.
You can end up family-less.
Like you will find yourself in the village. Or reduced to a single room in Dandora. Hiding from friends who knew you in your "Prime".

Last week, I saw a young, swashbuckling lawyer, with a cute family, write with the cocky confidence of a late 20s young man with everything going for him. He was dismissive of seemingly older men with no sense of direction. My immediate wish to him was not for him to lose all he has in order to learn the hard way. I want him to succeed, so much, such that he never has to see the ugly side of the coin of life that most men later experience in life.

In deed, more men do just fine, with a few knocks, here and there, but they survive. But those who survive, are helped the more by certain guardrails; family (coming from a good family background helps a lot, give your children that, please), they have friends or networks that get them out of the hole, they have abundant luck, and I do believe those who believe in God, God has a way of opening doors).

But you can have all that, and still things go wrong.

You can end up an addict.
You can end up a conman and you don't even see it coming. You can end up a beggar. Or anything.

My Kisii people say, "oborema n'igoro bore", loosely translated, "disability comes with old age" or "as you grow older". Commonly it refers to physical disabilities, like spraining your leg when climbing down a flight of stairs. Or when you step on a slippery floor.

But I have been thinking of the phrase in terms of the psychological defeat or disability that come with older age.

That time in your 40s when you realise that you have efed up a big one. And there is no way out. That time when life has defeated you, and you have to move from Lang'ata toll Utawala(initially), before you end up in Kibera, or some dusty outpost in the outskirts of Nairobi. Humiliated and humbled.

There is the economic disability that comes with age: losing a job and you are no longer marketable, or your skills are no longer that attractive in the market place. You send your CVs out but you soon realise, any company worth its salt, is better off employing a recent college graduate who is agile, ambitious and cheaper. Also, you could be the best businessman today, only to be out of season next year, ending up in debt with no possibility of recovery.

And then there is the social disability that comes with losing your wife in your 40s

How do you show up in the village to explain that your wife of 17 years has left with your teenage children?

First of all, you can't explain a divorce to anyone. Worse, if you have to move out of your matrimonial home. You show up in an apartment in Eastlands, man solo, like mudfish, and starting to cook for yourself. Hiding from relatives is not uncommon. But that is the least of your worries. Society judges men the hardest when older and unmarried. They ask questions. Where has he been? What was he doing? What did he do? And lately, people can draw conclusions that you are a Sim 2 merchant, as if the situation wasn't worse enough. I think of men who have to hide from their childreb(it is a thing) because they have nowhere to host their children. NOTE: if you are a man, don't ever do that, your children can love you even when you live in a single room in Gachie or some place. But I understand the necessiry of the "shame".

Dating in your 40s can be tricky, especially if you have meagre means. I recently saw a 20-something girl complain about dating a late 40s teacher who lives in a single room, and uses that wicker-stove to cook. Have you ever used that wicker-stove to cook? Despite the living conditions of that teacher for late 40s dude, the chick said that the man did know his Google maps between the shits.

Enter the middle-age nihilism of most millennial men(though it has been like that throughout the ages: men can be nihilistic as they grow older).

A few men when confronted with obvious defeat, fight back, and bounce back with enviable resilience.

Some accept the average sadness of life, adjust their sails, and live accordingly to what life throws at them.

Yet more sink into oblivion. Absorbed by alcohol, drugs and other addictions that swallow them whole, accelerating their death.

Long story short.
If you are a young man today with a flying career, do your level best to build a solid foundation for your life. You will certainly get a few things wrong. Buy the wrong piece of land. Invest in what seems as the next big deal (that will end up like Cytonn), or Crypto against all good judgement. You could marry wrong. Or she could turn up rogue down the line. The number of men in the 30s suddenly realising they are in dead marriages is not even alarming. It is the norm, lately and many extricating themselves.

I want to finish with those whose lives could be irrevocably ruined by marriage for reasons they have no control: wife cheating with their boss, wife moving abroad, wife suddenly realising she wants better for herself.

Some men tend to take it too personal and never recover when she eventually leaves. They become the sad shells of their former selves, rudderless and hopeless.

I pray that no man will ever have to end up hopeless because wife (and kids left).

All in all, regardless of the curveball, wherever life throws you, keep your head up.

As the old riddle says, if you are in a desert, and a lion is chasing you, just run and climb the tree. But there are no trees in the desert, you say. The philosopher said: there is always a tree.

Find it.

Find the damn tree.

[Eric Mahiga Musasia. @Mahigamusasia]

@RiaraIntl @Jabalicschools Your involvement is needed on raising with the authorities to have the Imara area junction road surface repaired as this is the road accessing your institutions and its condition causes massive delays/traffic especially when you have a function.

[Kgoshi Ya Lebowa @Mothematiks]

The most badass wild life short video of all time 🐆

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

Check out Trapponi's video! #TikTok https://t.co/dcYriFlOb1

[FERDINAND OMONDI @FerdyOmondi]

Fun fact: Louis Armstrong performed at the Little Theatre in Mombasa in November 1960, during one of his tours of Africa.

[Farrar @Farrartoya]

@LilithBlack25 Profound......