LET IT GO

An old friend mentioned a few days ago, “I’m not sure why you go and what it is your looking for out there” and inwardly I thought to myself…..

“Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize to much in these sympathies and tenderness - remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.”  Henry James


The minivan pulls away from the frenzied taxi park and I take one last look to see if Moono will take the 10 birr note that I had offered.  Time  slows…… sluggish enough that, now, 6 weeks later I can recollect  the scene wholly: foreground, background, my empathy,  his wounded pride.  Its all here within me at this moment.  Black exhaust smoke trails the van as we move out of the taxi park.  Men bark the names of destinations. The street teems with life: women sell fruits, water, and cookies carried precariously in boxes on their heads; men hawk newspapers, books, pencils, and pens; the marriage of charcoal and roasting coffee beans fills the air; children  hurry off to school.  In the early dawn of morning busyness awakens from its brief slumber.  I’m jammed into the rear seat with four others; Ali is in the front oblivious to my most vivid image of Africa.  Moono now begins to hurry after the van yet cannot catch up, and still running, gestures for me  to throw the money down.  The man next to me says, “let it go”.  I release it, and as it floats down to the ground, time slows all the more.  In those moments between my fingers letting go, the bill landing on the ground, and Moono picking it up I accept my place of ignorance and I embrace the reality that my logic and reasoning does not belong here.  I can have no understanding of a situation that I cannot even contrast and compare with.  I accept it and still have no answer for it.

Without going far into detail I will tell you that Moono was a boy of maybe 9 or 10  who met us on the street and spent an evening with Ali and I in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.  He was bright, articulate, and he had one of those beautiful laughs that bowled him over and made you smile deep inside because it took over his whole self.  He was a lovely boy.  On our side of the world he would probably go on to be something that only those entitled with innate ambition and intelligence can aspire to.  He met us in the morning before we moved on to our next destination and expected a tip for the prior night of leading us around Bahir Dar.  10 birr was not enough for him and his pride would not let him accept it.  But pride is always defined by circumstance, and as our vehicle finally pulled away that morning I watched him cast his eyes aside, pick up the bill, and put pride in his back pocket and 10 birr in his front.  10 birr (75 cents) that would help feed him and his mother and 10 birr that would be a forever image to me of how life is not fair and how I can never narcissistically believe that I can understand anything beyond my own personal experience.

…..I thought to myself that deep down  I’m always trying to realize a better person within.  A person whom makes judgments from experience gathered.  Judgments garnered from a disposition inherited from a beautiful, selfless mother that encouraged such.  And it’s here in Africa, within a society where struggles are found within all aspects of life, that I earn and learn the most.  I’m not Mr. Henry James and I prefer to find the problematic answers to my own algebra while also looking for the resolutions for others.  That is why I go and that is what I’m looking for “out there”.