It has been said that familiarity breeds contempt. I’ve known this to be true with both people and places. You hang around someone long enough, inevitably that perfecting sheen of newness will wear off. Those little idiosyncrasies that started off seeming adorable may either suddenly become obnoxious and unbearable or they may fade into the haze of the everyday and become nothing more than ordinary. The same goes for places. You see the same things again and again, day-in and day-out, what once appeared miraculous will look and feel mundane. Most of us travel through our days not even noticing where we are. The scenery serves merely as a backdrop to our activities, like wallpaper in an overused room. You’ve seen it all before: the flowers, the trees, the buildings, the potholed roads you negotiate every morning to get to work. “Oh, it’s the same,” people respond when you ask them about their lives or their jobs, their friends or their spouses, all the things and people they’ve grown accustomed to. “Nothing new.” Maybe this tendency to take things for granted is just human nature. However, the danger in it is that it can make you too easily dismissive, blind to the wonder and beauty that is being birthed everyday all around you. The other day I phoned my cousin, Sandra, to wish her a happy birthday. I met Sandra several years ago when our children attended the same school. I had no idea that she and I were related. She seemed like a nice enough person, but beyond polite greetings and other casual pleasantries, we didn’t really communicate or socialize. Even when I found out that we were related, I took it as nothing more than an interesting piece of information, another name to hang on a branch of my family tree. Like so many Ghanaians, my family is huge. Indeed, far from feeling like a family tree sometimes it feels more like a massive jungle in desperate need of pruning. There are scores of aunts and uncles and cousins, a number of whom I’ve discovered I share absolutely nothing with except the blood that flows through our veins. But somehow, recently, Sandra and I began chatting and getting to know one another. These conversations started to take place at a time when I was becoming increasingly jaded. More than anything, I missed the friends I’d left behind in the U.S. I didn’t like, or fully understand, the dynamics of friendship, as it seemed to be played out here. There was far too much gossip, deception, dishonesty, envy and ill favour for my taste. One gathering of “friends” that took place not so long ago had left me wary. A woman with whom I was becoming acquainted—I’ll call her Olivia the Okro Mouth—started telling the lot of us all manner of negative things about another woman—I’ll call her “Martha the Wrongly Maligned.” When, in response to Okro Mouth’s rant, I remarked that Wrongly Maligned sounded like a terrible human being, Okro Mouth said, “Oh, she’s actually not so bad. We’re good friends.” I was aghast. If someone’s friend could do her like that, how much more her enemies? “But that’s how Ghanaians are,” several people told me when I recounted the details of that incident. “They are well-educated in the school of PHD—Pull Him Down.” I’ve never been one to subscribe to such broad generalisations and characterizations, but disappointment after disappointment had left me wondering if maybe this was true. Maybe, I thought, this sort of behaviour has been so accepted it has become a cultural norm. Could that be? It had got to the point where I’d started seeing what was in front of me—people who were duplicitous and disloyal—as ordinary, becoming blind to all else that existed right in front of me. My burgeoning friendship with Sandra, who is a beautiful and kind and talented person of tremendous integrity, became something of an oasis in the desert for me. Not only was it refreshing, it opened my eyes to a new landscape of possibility. Literally and figuratively. When I phoned Sandra to wish her a happy birthday, she invited me to a small dinner she was hosting to celebrate. I accepted, with great hesitation. As much as I wanted to see Sandra, I had grown bored of going out in Accra, seeing the same faces at the same restaurants, places with bad décor and even worse service. “It’s this new place that I discovered in Osu,” Sandra said, “called La Villas.” She seemed excited about the place but, truthfully, I wasn’t expecting much. In my mind, I could already envision the quotidian furniture, the attitudinal waitresses, the underwhelming loo. But that’s not at all what I found when I entered La Villas, a boutique hotel that’s been in business for only a few months. Following Sandra’s directions, I drove down some dusty and bumpy road until I found the sign to La Villas and pulled into the car park. The entrance and lobby were nice, but I still wasn’t too impressed. The surprisingly helpful and attentive man at the front desk said he’d escort me to the restaurant. When he opened the door and I took my first step into the courtyard all I could do was gasp and say was, “Oh my goodness.” I felt like I had stumbled upon a secret door in the back of a musty wardrobe and stepped into Narnia or some other fantastical paradise. It was meticulously manicured and absolutely breathtaking. I had the most spectacular evening, one that reminded me of something my grandmother told me when I was seven years old and full of myself. At that age, if you can imagine, I felt that I had “been there and done that,” there was nothing new or exciting to discover. “If you think you’ve seen everything,” my grandmother said, “keep living. Stick around a little longer.” Of course, I didn’t get what she was saying. My first thought was, Keep living? What am I going to do, drop dead? I have no choice but to keep living! Growing older has brought the wisdom of my grandmother’s words to the fore. What I now take those words to mean is that life, as it unfolds, will never stop surprising you. Don’t allow yourself to take your circumstances for granted or become blind to the things and people around you. Thanks to my evening at La Villas with my cherished cousin Sandra and her group of dynamic women friends, I am beginning, once again, to see Accra and the people I meet in a different light. As the saying goes, “my eyes are wide open.” Ghana is a beautiful country, filled with some amazing people doing good work, trying to reach new heights. There is much to discover and re-discover here, so much that we are bound to miss if we allow ourselves to fall into that trap of feeling too familiar, believing that it’s the same old place with the same old people. Nothing is ever the same. Every day the world continues to spin, offering us the gift of a brand new vantage point, a brand new perspective, if we so choose to stick around a little longer and accept. This article is copyrighted creative property, NOT fair use material. All rights reserved. This article may NOT be republished or reposted without permission of the author. “The View From Here,” a weekly column by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, is published every Friday in the Daily Graphic. The author, who is currently accepting registrations for a private writing workshop, can be reached at outloud@danquah.com