Book Review: Harnessing Inner Tranquility
Being of age 27 does not diminish the author’s ability
to seamlessly hold the book’s thematic interest by its horn. Having left
audiences in awe with the release of his earlier book Dealing with A Heartbreak; Therapy for The Broken which cooked a
name for him among bookworms, Sukali
was the right voice to address this phenomenon and true to his reputation, he
skillfully handles the subject matter at hand.
As they say: “Experience is a great teacher.” Harnessing Inner Tranquility, is not a
work of fiction or a mass of borrowed experiences. Sukali presents the book to
consumers in the fashion of a first-person omniscient narrator and that makes
the book a must read and not one that must gather dust on the bookshelf. The
book is divided into four parts. The first part titled The Path of Emptiness, the second
part is titled The Path of Love, the
third part is titled The Path of Truth,
and finally The Path of the Self. The
Chronology of the divisions is top notch because it follows the stages of
growth that an individual partakes.
The author also brings into discussion, real life
examples which are down-to-earth demonstrations of individuals harnessing their
inner tranquility. For instance, the author’s friend Dumie who was raised as a
catholic and was religious for a good spell of years until denounced his
Catholicism and Christianity in general. For Dumie, foreign religions are a
fraud and an opium for our mental incapacitation. It is what has been used to
control us. His new path is on rekindling the African way of worship which
roots in ancestry, we can only be whole if we reconnect with what we were,
spiritually, before the Bible and Quran were introduced to us. One lesson that
is emerging from Dumie’s story is that inner tranquility presents us with a
rare window of opportunity to become one with thyself.
As the pages of the book gather ground to Chapter 4, it
is becoming more undoubted that being governed by one’s free will and not that
of the society is a great weapon for one’s peace of mind. Here what the author
is conveying to readers is that one should embrace rejection among other
things. Come to think of it, had the people of Nazareth not rejected Jesus,
would the gentiles stand a chance of benefitting from the wonders of the
messiah. What if Peter had not denied knowing Jesus on three occasions, would
the Messiah have been crucified? If Ben Carson had not accepted his failure
during his early school days, he could not have ended up as one of the best
surgeons in medical mythology.
African bestseller Chinua Achebe wrote in his book
THINGS FALL APART that: “As a man danced and so were the drums beaten for him.”
As a reader you cannot help but dance to the ring of the book as it lures you
onto the sermon brought to fore by Sukali. With this book, a reader can be left
to appreciate the manner in which the author has successfully managed to share
the walk of his life.
From a critique point of view, there are some few
instances where the book has exposed limited vocabulary in the sense that some
words have been called into action on several occasions. The book has also
failed to accommodate pictures in its presentation, the presence of pictures
helps to keep the reader in the narrative. On a lighter note, Harnessing Inner
Tranquility is a book that will challenge any reader with food for thought. I
therefore recommend all bookworms out there to have a read of this great book. After
all, Otis Bushiri described this book as therapeutic, inspirational and
philosophical. “Wow! This book is worth of all its praise. The work was done
with such special depth,” said Bushiri.
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