The Only Grand Thing We Can Possess Is Our Life

Everything else is a rental.

We may own nothing but our very being—our breath, consciousness, and the purposeful actions of our present. Everything else is transient—a rental—we learn to cherish the immediacy of existence. As one well‐known Kinyarwanda proverb reminds us: Iby’ejo bibara ab’ejo (Tomorrow’s things are told by those coming tomorrow)—a truth that compels us to refuse the doomscroll of borrowed anxieties, to recognise that each pause can be a glow-up of consciousness, and to cultivate a presence so authentic that even our rizz is not performance but resonance — a way of being that insists on meaning over distraction.

When walking through Kigali or its surrounding villages, one notices how creativity is not cordoned off in galleries but integrated into community life. In Rwanda, not only are paintings present everywhere, but bold, geometric imigongo art adorns not only the huts of traditional villages and the lobbies of the country’s finest boutique hotels. The hottest fashion design shops and artisan studios in the capital of Kigali proudly carry pieces of imigongo art on their shelves. What began centuries ago as decorative motifs on the homes of farmers now emerges as a global aesthetic language—minimalist, striking, and yet deeply human in its repetition and imperfection. The art testifies to continuity, to the human capacity to turn daily life into a stage for meaning. Transforming cattle dung, once a sign of rural subsistence, into structured elegance, not only aesthetic but existential: art takes what is base and reworks it into what is lasting.

In Umusambi Village. Image by the author. Aho abantu bari ntihabura urunturuntu (Places where people have been will not lack humanity) reflects how every place—and every artwork—carries human traces, emotion, memory.

At Umusambi Village, a sanctuary for the rare and endangered Grey Crowned Cranes, one sees how the act of conservation itself becomes a cultural and spiritual gesture—a kind of deep reset that resists quitting on nature, refuses the doomscroll of environmental collapse, and instead offers a collective glow-up for biodiversity, where care is not a trend but a long-haul commitment to presence and reciprocity.

The community laughter I experienced in nearly every interaction is a social reminder that consciousness is relational, not only individual.

Let me close this short note with another Kinyarwanda saying: Useka umuturanyi ukabyuka musa.—You laugh at your neighbour, then tomorrow you find yourself like them. Yes, life’s fragility binds us, and humility grounds creative expression and human connection. For if all else is rental, then perhaps our only lasting possession is not just our own being, but the way our being touches others—through greatness of art, compassion, thought — the refusal to let meaning slip into distraction.

The author at NP Arts Center