Optimism II

It is Sunday night. There is a long list of things that I could have, should have, would have (if only the [blank] hadn't gotten in the way) completed, things that are probably more important to be working on right now than this.

In my fourth year of medical school I participated in an amazing--truly, amazing--elective called HEART. Loosely, this spells "Humanistic Elective in Alternative Medicine, Activism, and Reflective Transformation." (A week ago was my five-year reunion, and the first reunion I've missed in these five years.) This elective marked my first formal exposure to the idea of nonviolent communication, or NVC.

Among other things, NVC encourages taking responsibility for one's own feelings and actions. To restate my first paragraph, I chose to do other things instead of the items on the "long list." I don't regret any of the things I chose, just as I don't regret doing the things I chose to do the previous weekend instead of going to the HEART reunion. At the same time, I did really want to go to that reunion. And I did really want to get to the things on my ever-evolving list.

The truth is that right now I am struggling.

I am struggling to try to keep up with things I want to do, things I said I would do, things I have hoped to do, things I've chosen not to do yet because I've chosen to do other things.

Years before the HEART elective, I had another amazing opportunity, namely to serve in the Peace Corps in South Africa. After several months working with township grade schools my job description was pretty clear in my mind. It was to get the teachers to stop hitting the students. This seemed fundamental. Yet the application of it was so complex, nuanced, daunting. How does one maintain order in a 30-minute class crammed with 60 students and armed only with a textbook in Afrikaans from 1952? How does one contend with parents' expectations that a classroom should be run as they experienced it, with a sjambok? How does one reverse the mental effects of Apartheid? How quickly can they be reversed?

One afternoon, after a particularly disheartening schoolday, I returned home only to find my normally pacific host mother stormy and my 8-year-old host brother crying. I can't recall the offense. Only the punishment. After briefly comforting 8-year-old Zama I recognized in myself the need for air, breath, wide open space, something, anything to escape the choking anger and hurt that threatened to cut off my airway.

I walked. Out of the township and back up the hill towards the railroad and the open veldt. Crying. Overwhelmed.

Halfway up I heard a familiar voice. I turned to find my best friend, 17-year-old Jeffrey Nkosi, running after me. His bright voice was tinged with concern. "Hey, my man! Why are you crying, my man?" In sobs and starts my responses, my story, my frustration and sense of helplessness at taking on this enormous task, found their way out. As they did, ever so slowly, the edge to the day softened. By the time we crested the hill and turned to walk along the coal-strewn railroad tracks, my tears were gone, and Jeffrey was inviting me home to share a loaf of bread with tea. "A half a loaf is better than none, you know?"

The answer is that one doesn't reverse 50 years of Apartheid, hundreds of years of poverty and oppresion. That task, as do most things worth pursuing, takes at least two. Just as there are few things more overwhelming than taking on a struggle alone, there are few things more empowering than finding comrades with which to share the struggle.

Remembering that I am not alone, I feel better. The list will still be there in the morning. Jeffrey, wherever you are, thank you.

Stillness

April 9th, 2009, Halfway, OR:
Stillness is usually the first thing I notice about coming home to my dad's house in Halfway. This time that was not the case, because yesterday was my dad's 70th birthday, and we threw him a surprise party. All the plans were in place: the false premise of a party a couple days later, the Higginses with a birthday cake comprising the initial sortie, the congregation at the bottom of the hill and the subsequent walk up. It was perfect. And in inimitable Hammar fashion, Dad took off in the car with our dog Hugo to go for a walk just half an hour before the Higginses were supposed to show up. I arrived after the eight-hour drive from Seattle to find my older brother circling on his bicycle at the end of our lane, hoping to divert all cars until Dad returned. A few minutes and several cars later we made the impromptu decision for everyone to go up the hill. I ran up and down the hill several times in the next hour as we awaited Dad's return—eventually he arrived home, was completely surprised, and the party was enjoyed by all—and did not really feel like I caught my breath until I went do bed that night. So my usual awareness of the stillness was postponed until today.

I wake up, for the first time in weeks, not to an alarm clock but to the rising of the sun. I get up and feed Hugo. We humans feed variously on granola (not Dad) and ham and eggs (Dad). Hugo and I go for a walk.

The sun is bright. The air is crisp and still quite cold and several large patches of snow blanket the ground. We climb to the upper bench, walk through a stand of pine trees that when I was growing up were Christmas-tree size and now reach 30 feet or more. Where the ground is bare it is still flattened, whether grass, leaves, or pine needles, only recently having shed an enormous weight. We walk through the North Gate. A ditch runs along the top of the ridge, eroded in places by cattle, and I have to find a place that is both shallow enough to jump and free enough of hawthorn bushes to permit passage.

An old dirt road leads from the ridge down into a marsh and up and over another hill. Here selective logging has thinned the pines enough to allow the sun to shine through in several places, the ground is dry and almost sandy; it would make an ideal home for the rabbits of Watership Down. Over the other side of the hill is another marshy flat with slowly flowing water that occasionally coalesces into a little brook.

In the center of the marshy flat nature is quickly reclaiming a cabin and a shed long abandoned by their builders. Three ancient relics of cars are more slowly decomposing. What looks to be an International Harvester pickup truck is but a rusting shell, while the tailfins of a '59 Cadillac still burst with their original, albeit-faded, lemon yellow color. A few stubborn pieces of glass remain in one rear side window. The third car, a convertible by design or destruction, is now undergoing its final metamorphosis into a truly open-air design.

As I cross over a barbed-wire fence and head back up into the woods that will eventually lead me home, it strikes me how indelibly we've altered the landscape even here in the tiny, remote Eastern Oregon town of Halfway. True, some of its former habitations are now dissolving into the ground whence they sprang up. In places fences sag or are gone completely. Trees once cleared for pasture are re-growing where permitted. But some changes may take longer to reverse. The beggars lice weed synonymous with livestock is now ubiquitous. Natural predators—grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves—are scarce or absent.

And yet in places like Halfway there is still stillness. There is still ample space and time for reflection, about the pace and nature of change, about presence of weeds and lack of wolves, about anything. This is less true in the city. At least for myself, I feel an unavoidable pull into motion when I am in Seattle, a raft pulled along by a current into what at times seems an unending rapid. Part of this has to do with density of humans, and perhaps part of it might have to do with most of those other humans seeming as though they are also struggling to keep their heads above the waters of a fast-paced river. Unless one makes a conscious effort to the contrary, this pace can lead to human interactions being shorter and more superficial. Needing to have more packed into any given time frame. Containing less stillness.

In the 70 years since my dad was born, the physical landscape of the earth has been altered more by human activity than in the 10,000 preceding years combined. We are now living in a landscape that is more different from that of 70, or certainly 170 years ago, than the landscape of those times differed from that of 10,000 years ago. And now since the time I was born an entirely new landscape is being created. This virtual landscape, that of the world online, is farther removed even than our cities from the natural world of fields and forests—the world from which all that we eat derives, the world in which once we ourselves were occasionally eaten, the world that, through an incredibly complex and varied symbiosis of millions of living organisms and natural cycles, gives us the air, water, and food essential to life. This new landscape is more prone to more and more packed and superficial interactions. By its very nature, of always being in creation, always being revised, improved upon, changed, it is anything but still.

I would be the last to say that we should not embrace this landscape, for it also contains an incredible potential to inform, to share ideas, to instantly access information that can help us make better decisions and to make them faster. At the same time I think it will be vital for us as a species to spend time in the stillness that can only be found outside, offline and unplugged. We are and always will be dependent of that landscape. And probably too on that stillness.