The Hot Season, the Long View

Yup, I'm still out here, sweating my way through the hot season. I'm dreaming of the rainy season, which could show up in as little as a month. It will be just as hot. With the humidity it will actually feel even hotter. However, as a native Chicagoan I am far more used to wet heat than this dry and ache-y misery that is the hot season in Mauritania. Also, rain will bring with it some greenery. I miss a great many things about America but what I miss most is the natural landscape. Granted, with the nasty cheap "development" that capitalists were so obsessed with during much of my childhood, natural landscape is in ever shorter supply. Mauritania has the same problem, as does much of the modern world, and it springs from taking a tragically short view.

It's easy to understand why people do. We have, after all, tragically short lives. However, our impact does not need to be short or tragic. To walk, even to stumble and crawl, toward a goal larger than our own lives makes us grand, makes our impact far-reaching.

That certainly isn't an easy thing, and I don't say it lightly. The worst ignorance in my own life is of perspective and constancy. I know that I would rather come to the end of my days having lived broadly and deliberately. It is my greatest fear that I won't do so. And yet in full spite of my fear and my hope, I often find myself bobbing along with a current I didn't choose intelligently and trying not to realize it.

Perspective is a tense muscle, constancy is a routine to stretch it. But ignorance is tricky and persistent. I forget lessons I don't use, even hard-won lessons I treasure in my mind, heart, body, and soul. I am learning great things here in Mauritania. And as much as I want to leave and go back to the easy life that I knew in America, I know I must stay. I know that what is best for me is to last, to stretch, to reach, and perhaps at the end find that I am healthier, more flexible and connected than I was, moving toward a grand pursuit I chose in awareness and joy.