I was reminded last week that five years now has a significance for me beyond just being a David Bowie song. On this day in 2006 - five years ago - I was an exchange student at the University of Ghana in Legon, on the outskirts of Ghana's loud, polluted, bustling, seedy capital, Accra. The past few weeks have been a long, colorful parade down Memory Lane as every little thing has started reminded me of West Africa...even the perennial jokes about lutefisk that seem to grown so naturally in the rich topsoil of rural Iowa have made me think of the neverending stench of dried, smoked fish that permeates every market and food stall in southern Ghana.
Somehow, though, even more than the goings-on of five years ago and the colorful, vibrant misadventures I inexplicably survived (check out malariamonday.blogspot.com sometime), my mind keeps going back to how my remembering of my time in Ghana has changed over time. In the first few months after getting back, it was constant, and I think I probably bored everyone to death with one story after another about how, "when I was in Ghana," I did something that I thought was really cool, and that most other people thought was cool, too, the first ten times I told them that story. After a few months, though, the deeper, darker experiences started to come back into my mind - one particular scene, involving a group of (literally) starving children in Burkina Faso asking me for money, came into my mind almost every night as I was trying to go to bed. When people proved even less interested in hearing about that, I found myself nearly losing my faith in God, and partying as much as possible.
Then, I went to Uruguay after graduating from college, and year two rolled around. There was a lot of healing; I found my own sense of guilt and powerlessness in the face of a cruel world which preserving my own privilege helped create start to fade away and grow into a positive commitment to working for justice as I spent a year NOT just trying to make myself happy. I did have the occasional West Africa daydream, though, especially when it was cold and rainy...it's so easy to picture myself on a camel in the Sahara outside of Timbuktu when it's raining.
When I moved to Chicago, I found that my time in Ghana suddenly had to take a backseat to my time in Uruguay; I had a lot from Montevideo to process, and so Ghana just fell off the radar screen, except when I'd be reminded of one random adventure or another. And so years three and four went by pretty quietly.
And now, here I am in Dayton, Iowa, and suddenly...it's been five years. It still feels strange saying that - it's been five years since I had my entire world flipped over and shaken out like a dirty, sandy rug. And...well, here I am, living in the middle of Iowa farm country for an equally bizarre experience of the cross-cultural variety...but a much more, well, vanilla one. It's Iowa farm country - lots of nice people (all of them white enough to make me look like James Brown in comparison) working the land and going about their small town lives. The city kid in me is grateful for the experience, but is screaming for a little more excitement.
So now, five years on, I'm finding myself fighting almost the opposite battle I fought while I was in Ghana. In Ghana, it was all too easy to live in the present, to savor the exotic flavors and bright colors and loud Ghanaian belly laughs, and forget that all good things must pass. There was no past (except when it nosed its way in, usually uninvited), and there was no future - there was just the open road of today, holding who knows how many adventures. These days, though, I find it difficult to anchor myself in present because of how often my mind heads in the other direction. It's just easier to think back to the times when my life was a little more colorful, and to the people not here with me who I'd be downing pitchers with at Jimmy's on 55th Street if it were this time last year. More than anything, I think about Chicago - my past there, and my future there when I move back in six months. What will it be like? Who will be in it? What new stories will come from one more year of life in Hyde Park?
It's a struggle, it really is - how do I keep myself active and engaged here? How do I make the present something more than just the waiting room between the past and the future? I'm finding that, when I try, I can usually find at least something every day that anchors me down enough to at least be present in the now rather than off floating in the ether of what was or what will be. Sometimes, it's the actual work - sermon writing, meetings, and the like. Sometimes, it's in the relationships - conversations that remind me that I'm not alone out here. Sometimes, it's in just writing about how sometimes I struggle to be here now. One way or another, I'm sailing by ash breeze until the wind picks up and I'm on the way again...and I think I'm pretty OK with that.
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