Anatomy of Laziness

When the lazy man yawns the market women hear

The lazy Man likes to prolong action, he wishes that it rains so he can sleep

It’s no use telling a lazy man not to sleep, the day of his shame is nearer than ever.

The lazy man hears about a sumptuous meal of pounded yam, and draws a chair

He hears of a journey to the farm and carelessly throws away the cutlass

The lazy man cannot strike the palm tree for wine

Neither can he shoot at the dove for meat.

The lazy man gets to the palm tree and opens his mouth

Yes, it must drop for free!

What you have just read about is my conversion to English of a poem I learnt in Yoruba class in Secondary School. Let me give you the raw form so that just in case you understand the language it can make some sense to you. If you don’t understand Yoruba, please feel free to skip this part.

{Ole yan oloja gbo

Ole afajo, o in ojo ki ba ro, ki oun raye sun

A kii so pe ki ole ma sun, ojo ete re ku is dede

Ole gbo ti iyan, o fa ijoko mora

Ole gbo ti oko, o so ada nu pereku pere

Ole o le sagi logbe, Beeni ki le ta adaba lofa

O de idi ope, o gbenu soke,

Ofe nin ro}

In my recent meditations, I have come to realize that the majority of human beings are lazy. How do you know when someone is lazy? It is quite simple, from the poem above, and most importantly from the holy book, we can arrive at clear characteristics of a lazy person.

1. Delay

A lazy person likes to delay. Delays action, delays decisions, delays to do the things he knows he ought to do. Laziness is characterized by delays. I will do it later, next week or month end. The lazy person silently wishes that while he or she is waiting, something will happen that will make the wait eternal.

2. Sleep

A lazy person loves to sleep. The day breaks just too early, to early for the lazy person to be well rested. When you are idle, there are many things you can do other than sleep. The lazy person sleeps. Sleep here does not always however mean closing your eyes and lying down. You are sleeping when your brain is not in gear, you are sleeping when you have a love relationship with nothing, that is you are doing nothing and nothing is doing you.

3. Excuses

The lazy or slothful person invented excuses. Excuses are also reasons, but they are reasons for failure not reasons for succeeding. They are excuses for not doing what they should have done, or not being where they should have been. The lazy man cannot go into the market because he figures that there is a lion in the street. He perceives hindrances to his achievement and creates more reasons to fail than to succeed.

4. Planless

They say to fail to plan is to plan to fail. If you have lofty goals or great dreams, those define the upper limits of your achievements. If you prepare and have plans, those are the lower limits of your aspirations. In other words, your dreams define how high you’ll ever rise, and your plans show how low you can fall. If you have big dreams and no plans, you life will be frustrated and out of order. Lazy people do not plan. The same spirit of delay and procrastination makes them put off planning until execution. You can look at the work of a lazy person, and identify laziness by how much planning went into the enterprise.

5. Poor

The word POOR has been reduced into a useful acronym for Passing Over Opportunities Repeatedly. The lazy man regularly passes over opportunities. He takes things absolutely easy, he plays it safe, and he ventures nothing and vanquishes nothing. The lazy man usually ends up poor. I know many people are likely to reason that poverty is not always caused by laziness, but tell me, is poverty a result of hardwork? Laziness and poverty are covenant partners, where laziness abounds, poverty is around the corner. If you want to host poverty, simply nap frequently, take a few days off, sit back and take things easy.

Laziness is a plague besieging lots of people in third world countries. We need to wrestle ourselves free from laziness, idleness and cowardice.

By Adeolu Akinyemi