I have rules when travelling abroad.
1. Don’t talk too much. You will inevitably sound like a loud American.
2. Don’t dress in brand-name clothing or wear white sneakers. You will look like a rich American.
3. Pay attention to your surroundings but don’t pay too much attention to any one thing. You’re already a mark because you’re a loud rich American.
4. Know where you’re going ahead of time and be sure of your directions. If you stop to ask, you will reveal yourself as a loud rich lost American.
5. For God’s sake, don’t stop to take unnecessary photos with your gigantic new phone. That puts you one step closer to being a loud rich lost American who now needs to find their way to the consulate because their phone and fanny pack have just been stolen.
I broke all these rules (well, except the clothing one) when we went to go visit the archaeological dig at Sterkfontein. You could barely keep me quiet as we explored the mouth of a cave to learn about how fossils are deposited there. The world around me ceased to exist once we were taken back to look at some of the fossils and casts—all I could focus on was the skull in front of me and the millions of questions I had about it. I had no idea where I was going through the whole day, because I was part of a tour group, and I occasionally found myself lost on the site as I went to go look at whatever interested me. And dear god, the photos. I took so many pictures.
(There’s an upcoming fun science/science and religion post that I’ll link to here whenever I write it.)
I had completely forgotten what it was like to be struck with curiosity like that, to have your mind generate a thousand questions a minute and to begin to think through hypothesis and tests and conclusions, to use what you know to rule out answers that didn’t make sense and to watch the entire puzzle come together in front of your eyes. I dominated our guide’s time on the second half of the trip, at Maropeng, because as the evolutionary timeline was laid out in front of me, I had question after question about what caused what and how we know what we know and what we’re going to do with that information. It was like a breath of fresh air to my mind and I was so glad to have this wonderful, knowledgeable, bright woman to answer all those questions, even if I had to get her to repeat a word or two because I misunderstood her accent. It has been far too long since the wheels in my head started turning like that.
But if I abandoned my rules for reasonable international travel at Sterkfontein, my rules abandoned me later in the evening. We had a pizza dinner at the house of a former bishop, current pastor, with another pastor and another bishop in attendance. There were preachers and teachers all around and everyone was talking and making noise and leaving everything everywhere and focusing more on the person in front of them and their conversations than anything around them and I had no idea where I was, except that I was at a parsonage near a church somewhere in Johannesburg. I saw my first glimpse of a night sky that seemed upside down to me while the people behind me chatted and made friends and shared stories and food and photos. If it had been possible for me to be a little louder, a little less worried, a little less concerned about how to avoid attention and get where I wanted to be, maybe I would have heard more of those conversations, learned more, been fed by the people around me spiritually, emotionally, and physically. That pizza wasn’t half bad.
I don’t do small talk. I don’t do well in groups. Give me a someone to sit down with who is happy to talk about more than the weather and my career path and we will find something to dig into. That’s where life is for me in a social interaction. And to ask me to meet a bunch of strangers while still jetlagged at the end of a long day, a day where my brain had felt so vibrant earlier, well, that’s a recipe for minor panic, and irritation, and a frustrated feeling that the vibrancy I had has all been sucked into not panicking in front of strangers and maintaining a semi-pleasant face.
One day, I’ll write a thoughtful post about Liliesleaf Farm, probably in comparison to the Apartheid Museum, and I’ll post it here. And maybe I’ll post about the lunch we had with people in Soweto, where I learned Zulu and ate a homemade meal with my hands and talked about all the political challenges our countries face and post it here. And maybe I’ll post about dinner and the restaurant cat and the varieties of religious conversations that pop up when you gather seminary students and bishops around a table and link to it here. But mostly, what I have been struck by in the past two days is what gives me life, and what drains it from me, and how fragile I can be. Send me out into the world, let me explore, let me think, let me wonder, give me a trusted soul to share with, and I’ll fly. Sit me down unmoored at a people with twenty new people and I will drown.
Well, at least until I learn the rules for how to swim.
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