Do you think you have glory? it’s a strange question but hear me out.
You see, there are people who arrive into the world, carrying a strange light around them. Before they have earned a thing, before they have fought a battle or won a prize, life already seems inclined in their direction. Doors open. Fortune lingers. Their names travel farther than they do. We watch them from a distance and tell ourselves stories about destiny. We say they are gifted. We say they are blessed. Sometimes, if we are being honest, we say something harder: they were chosen. As Prince Zuko from Avatar, the last Airbender observed, some people are born lucky, while others are lucky to be born. Some people have to find the light, discover themselves, go through a journey, battle their fears, while some are born at the finished line. Let’s start out from the only Inheritance everyone receives from their parent, both rich and poor: the a spell casted after birth: the name given to child. Maybe that could explain why some people stand out.
Permit me a small experiment. Let me rename you, Michael. Congratulations, you are Michael now. That single name carries centuries of triumph, power, celebrity, and myth. As a member of this distinguished fraternity, you stand among the likes of the Archangel Michael, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Michael ‘Mike’ Tyson, Michael Phelps, Michael B. Jordan, and countless other Michaels, living and dead, real and fiction. Yet, not every Michael is remarkable. In fact, I know many who are not. One worked as a janitor at a company where I was employed. To call him extraordinary would be dishonest. Then again, who am I to determine the measure of another man? What I do know is that he did not occupy the same place in my imagination as Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, or Michael, the Archangel, the divine warrior who casted Satan and his demons from heaven.
Perhaps the name Michael is too weighty an example. But whether we admit it or not, the way we see the world is more than who bears the name, it’s about the person beneath. A skyscraper does not look the same from the eyes of a janitor named Michael as it does from those of a CEO named Michael working in the very same building. We do not look at every Michael the same way, the name itself guarantees nothing. We reserve a different gaze for those rare individuals whose lives seem touched by an invisible hand. The sort of people after whom children are named.
My grandfather named me Clinton after the forty-second President of the United States. In doing so, he inadvertently placed me among millions of other Clintons orbiting the gravity of one man. And perhaps that is why I have always been fascinated by the question of favour. Why do some people seem born with an extra measure of it? Why does life appear to lean toward them? The story of Esau and Jacob survives because it speaks to a feeling many of us know too well—the suspicion that someone else received the blessing first. That someone else began the journey already ahead. Like it or not, some Jacobs are just loved by God even before birth.
Contemporary Yoruba has a word for this phenomenon: Ògo. It is usually translated as glory, but glory is too small a translation. Ògo is not the applause that follows labour, nor the reward at the end of endurance. It is the unsettling possibility that grace arrived before effort. That God smiled before you had done anything to deserve it. Christians call it grace, Muslims call it Baraka (Alùbáríkà), Others call it luck. Everyone is in agreement that Life does not distributes its gifts equally.
To describe Ògo in scientific terms is to venture into the science of probability. While there is no universally accepted way to calculate the odds of any one person existing, scientists agree that the chain of events leading to your birth is astronomically unlikely. One often-cited illustration puts the odds at around 1 in 400 trillion, not as a scientific measurement, but as a way of conveying just how extraordinary your existence is. In that sense, all of us are fortunate simply to be alive.
But being alive is only the beginning. What are the odds of becoming a millionaire? Globally, fewer than 1% of people have a net worth of at least one million dollars. The odds of becoming a billionaire are even more staggering. With only about 3,000 billionaires in a world of more than eight billion people, the probability is roughly 1 in 2.7 million. Then there is longevity. Reaching your 100th birthday will be a remarkable feat, only achieved by about 1 in every 10,000 people worldwide. Put together, these numbers reveal the truth: life is already an improbable gift, and many of the achievements we celebrate are statistical outliers. Every millionaire, billionaire, and centenarian is living proof of odds that most people will never beat.
I wish I had a happier ending to this. I don’t. Sometimes the odds fall in your favour. Sometimes they don’t. It is what it is. Perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth about Ògo.