Showers: Back in America

Cape Town just came out of a drought, but is still very much at risk of running out of water. Signs are everywhere (though not as prevalent at the V&A Waterfront or at the airport) telling people at the sink to use hand sanitizer instead of washing their hands and people in the toilets to let it mellow.

The shower where we stayed instructed us on how to do the 5 minute "Power Shower": you use the water for two minutes to rinse the dirt off, then you shut it off and lather up for a minute, then you use the water for two minutes to rinse soap off. Despite being someone who takes 15 minute showers minimum, I found it surprisingly effective.

I did the Power Shower the whole time we were in Cape Town, though it might have been 6 minutes after I took a swim in the ocean. After we left Cape Town, we spent more than a day in transport, in airplanes and airports, and most of us joked about how what we wanted most of all was to be in our own houses taking an hour-long shower in our own baths. It's a delight to "wash the people off of you," as a friend of mine puts it. A long shower is usually what's in order after having to rinse off in airport bathrooms and layer on the deodorant in order to be amenable to the abundance of humans that surround you during air travel. All that stress and recirculated air washes down the drain when you shower.

Or I thought it would, anyway. I had thought that a shower would wash away whatever stress and frustration remained from this trip and leave me ready for a new semester and the resumption of my life in DC, but standing in the shower, all I could do was look at the water spiraling down the drain and think, "Do I really need this?"

I don't intentionally walk into experiences thinking that they'll change me anymore. I had enough of that with retreats and weekends away which all left me the same, just more tired. I walked into this trip already exhausted with low expectations. I've travelled abroad before. I'm aware of how to suck the marrow out of life. I know what it's like to encounter another culture and listen instead of talk. I know how to process what I'm seeing, how to be challenged and enlivened at the same time. I've done this all enough to be something close to efficient at it. I've been on newness overload and so even profound new encounters have become a bit blasé. I feel like my friends who went to Hawaii on their honeymoon. By the end of the first week, their emotional reaction to the beauty around them was, "Oh great. Another gorgeous waterfall."

I learned so much in South Africa. There will be future posts about the scientific work that's being done at Sterkfontein and the surrounding sites, as well as with the shipwrecks off the coast of Cape Town. I'll likely reference what I've learned about nationwide forgiveness and the continued struggle against systems of oppression for the next few years of my life. I can already see the broad strokes outline of my experience taking shape as my brain does the background processing that it needs to do. I had the immersion experience I was expected by others to have.

But I didn't expect to come back much changed at all. I didn't expect to have any new discomfort at my privileges. I saw giraffes and stayed on the beach, for Pete's sake. How was this trip supposed to challenge me, except through the lens of history, with a dash of poverty tourism? Apartheid may have fallen in the 90s, but there are still large numbers of black and colored South Africans are living in unacceptable conditions in the townships apartheid created and impoverished. The question that faces the country today, especially as it aims to move itself out of the corrupt presidency of Jacob Zuma, is how to rightly govern while combating the continuing economic and land-based apartheid, without going the way of Zimbabwe. There is much to learn from all of this, of course, but I can't for the life of me understand how it impacted me so much.

I love showers and my part of the US isn't in drought. Why am I begrudging myself a shower? I need my space away from other people from time to time, otherwise I'm miserable. Why does my bedroom, my house suddenly feel much too big? I can get in my car and go anywhere I like, eat anything I like, and yet I've stayed home, away from the grocery store, because I am not ready for the overwhelming experience of the cereal aisle. Despite all my efforts in this life, I have not done enough to earn the luxury that I live in, the luxury that is, of course, slowly killing the planet and more quickly killing some of the people on it.

I wasn't prepared to come back to normal. I wasn't prepared to begin making the decisions about how I want to live again. After two weeks of going where I'm told and having the luxury of throwing around critical remarks when we made a stop I thought was unnecessary, I'm now faced with all the unnecessary things I have chosen for myself. The urge to sell everything I've ever owned and make a simple living on a farm somewhere in order to make as little environmental impact as possible is palpable. That and the urge to take a deep dive into political activism.

We have a beautiful world full of beautiful people who think up such beautiful things.

We have a dying world full of miserable people who think up deeply hurtful things.

These are both true.

The challenge of life, then, knowing that beauty and pain are laid out before us and that we do not get to choose the beauty and the pain we are born with, is to always seek beauty wherever it lives and always resist misery wherever it grows. The challenge of travel is, of course, that it makes us more aware of the misery in our own lives that we have grown comfortable with, the wells that we have drawn dry without a chance of replenishment.

So, the question that comes next, I guess, is what we should do about that.