Notes on Friendship and Gratitude

One night, our favorite, faithful professor/friend approached me and my friends as we ate dinner in the chilled dusk after a passionate soccer game in Mazumbai. As he stood before us with his classic mischievous grin, it hit me very suddenly that I’ll never see this man again come one month from now. That, as of that day, we were halfway through this program, the same time left in this little world we’ve so firmly created together as we’d already had. I was struck by immense sadness, that this person who has been so pivotal in making me feel at home will, just as suddenly as he entered my life, very suddenly exit it.

Then he explained his principle of love. If someone shows you love, you show them love. If someone makes you feel welcome, you make them feel welcome. If someone is kind to you, you are kind to them. In this way, he said, he knows he will see us again, because we want it to be so. If we want it to happen, he does too. He said this all with a smile on his face, a man whose job is to befriend students from faraway lands, to show them how to set up phone plans and how to bargain for cheap clothes, to help us and be kind to us and show us his home. He’s done it for us, and someday, he feels, we will do that for him. I hope so, I thought, staring out at the brightest moon I’ve ever seen, I really do.

Later that night, Ryan showed us the man in the moon as we sat with our backs to an old coffee mill, drinking warm beer that tastes like settling-in friendships and PBR. I might never unsee him, it seems, this slightly off-putting man peering down at us, but even if I do, I’ll never forget who showed this strange vision to me, this moment I can creep back to at any time, these unexpected kindnesses in this unexpected place, in this unexpected overlapping of our lives. How inseparable people can be from moments like this. 

In Serengeti, watching lightning storms race across the savannah, bumping back to camp at dusk. Staring at the biggest sky I’ve ever seen, endless miles of scrub and lions and far blue hills. Griffin asked me if I’d ever return to this place, this land of wild beasts and wilder skies. Without tearing my eyes from the landscape, I said that of course, at this moment, I couldn’t say no, after a day spent tracking lions through dry-season savannah, car lurching through herds of zebra, bright sun on dust-colored landscapes punctuated by tall rock structures and tropical trees. I told him, too, that I wouldn’t be able to say no at the end of the program, recognizing even as I said it that “I don’t want to leave” feeling swelling in my chest. I said it while considering how much I’ll miss this place. Considering how much I’ve learned and seen and felt. 

But the truth is that I won’t return, not because I don’t love this place and the days I’ve spent here, but because sometimes, maybe even often, the people make the place. I won’t return because I’ll never be quite here again, bumping along in a safari car with my new friends, people who know who I am right now better than anyone in the world. I’ll never be led through this wild new land by the professors I’ve come to admire and appreciate so much, and if I return, it’ll be as a tourist, my faded Swahili coming in handy for getting a cheap taxi, at most. As much as I love the idea of place itself, how landscapes can shape and teach us, I cannot separate these smiling faces, this gratitude, this friendship, from the dust and the storms and the animals. So no, I don’t think I’ll return, or, à la Ursula LeGuin, I will only return if I can recognize that I will be returning to a place I’ve never been. 

I’ve been feeling tricked by my own feelings, recently. It seems that the minute the “off” feeling I’ve described, of feeling lethargic and out of place and anxious went away, it was immediately replaced by a deep knot in my stomach, this sadness that I have to leave, feeling like this last month will slip through my fingers, fingers clinging onto the edge of memories as they come, coloring them with a sadness I didn’t expect and don’t want. It’s amazing, though, that I feel this way. If you’d asked me, on the first of September, if I’d be sitting in the office in mid-November surrounded by people I adore, feeling comfortable navigating Arusha by myself, speaking the language, taking on my independent research project, I wouldn’t quite have believed you. If you’d told me, on the 15th of September, as I fitfully fell asleep in my homestay, trying to remember my Swahili numbers, counting down the days until I could go home, that I’d be willing to do anything to stop the clock, to spend a few days doing nothing and reveling in it, I certainly wouldn’t have believed you. And yet, here I am. 

I have been practicing gratitude as a way to slow down time. I’ve been trying to appreciate that I’m happy while I still am, in the same way I felt this summer, and anytime I am home. It helps, I think, to recognize all of the good rather than live my life solely in hopeful anticipation. As a friend said to me recently, we can lose our gratitude sometimes, when we’re in the thick of it, but gratitude is a thread you can always find. ‘You could always have a headache right now’, I’ve been telling myself when I am many hours into long bus transit or as I struggle to fall asleep in a new place every week. It helps, I think. 

I am reminded of something Ryan’s homestay brother said to us once, almost two months ago in homestay, standing outside our neighborhood bar, in a brief, blissful rain shower, drinking cheap beer: “We must be grateful for the lives we have.” I smiled and pocketed the words as soon as he said them. I am grateful for the life I have, every day I am here. 

Even when there is much to be desired in a situation, I am finding gratitude. There have been moments in this country when I feel, tangibly, that I’m growing up, that my thought patterns are shifting and things that used to be true about me are no longer the case. Recently, sweating through my clothes in a safari car driving through the Serengeti, fever-ish with strep throat, unable to keep my eyes open, my mind an endless loop of nonsense Swahili phrases, I thought, very clearly “this will pass, and there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be”. I am so used to the opposite of this, the childish instinct that how I feel now is how I’ll feel forever, spending those low moments thinking of soft beds and my mom’s hand on my forehead. But I am recognizing now that I’d rather have all of this, the fevers and sleepless nights and constant dust in my hair, so that I too can have these memories that will never leave me, the infinite horizons, the friendships, the bathtub-temperature ocean full of creatures. It’s not a revolutionary thought, as my friends quickly reminded me, never ones to let me get away with my platitudes, but it’s never been so true. I am grateful for the life I have, and the people I am sharing it with.

My favorite raft guide in Chile had a cryptic tattoo on his forearm, one I pondered all winter until my mom showed up and finally asked him what it meant. Two arrows, which start parallel by his elbow until they overlap and head in opposite directions, parting again near his wrist. She asked him about it as we floated down glacier blue water between rapids. This is us, he said. Our lives. They were apart, he explained, pointing to where the arrows started, parallel but separate. But now, we are here, he said, tracing to the point of overlap, and one day we will be here, he continued, tracing his fingers to where the arrows separated again. 

I hope one day to be as content with this as he is, with the way our lives come together and irreversibly part again. For now, though, I am stuck in the beauty of our teacher’s reciprocal belief system, that because he has shown us kindness, and love, and welcoming, we will repay that favor one day, and our arrows will converge again. Perhaps there is a middle ground, somewhere between hope and belief and truth and reality. Somewhere between seeing the man in the moon and just seeing the moon, remembering the people who made you who you are without being blinded by the thought of when you’ll ever see them again. 

What I know for sure is that I have so much to learn from the people around me, and it is this belief that I am trying to keep close, letting the lessons stay and the people go.