My days in rural Kenya have fallen in a a routine, a necessary state of affairs if I’m to do what I’m setting out to here.
The passage of time is marked by dinosaurs. Each morning as Anita prepares tea and breakfast, I ask her to pick a color. She picks red, yellow, green or blue and I drop a capsule of that color into a glass of water on the table set up as my desk. Quite a complete family of dinosaurs has been born. But sadly, still no Tyrannosaur Rex. Today another yellow Ankleasaurus was born.
The easy part of what I’m doing here reaches into the future: covering Kenya’s March 4th elections as a freelance journalist, sending off queries and proposals every few days, interviewing political science professors. etc.
What’s difficult—as trying as anything I’ve undertaken—is writing my non-fiction “Guatemala book.” A few days ago I wrote in my journal (after my first six months neglecting, I’m keeping one again), “If I don’t finish the draft of the manuscript here, I never will.”
But it’s gotten more existential than that. Why do I need to write this book? Why do I need to write at all?
Every morning after a dinosaur is hatched, I pick up where I left off, scouring my old journals, notes, and memories to squeeze out the right words. But carving out this grand idea in my mind, translating it into the real world, hasn’t been easy. After several hours, I give up hope, not just on this project, on being a writer. That’s when I go for a two-hour run into the hills to get some perspective on this project, this life, to crush these qualms like the dry leaves on the dusty road.
I usually find what I need on these run. This book, this chapter of life, this life, is all, even though it rarely seems so, a choice. Writing has always been that given in my life. But still, I could always walk away from it and it’s this realization that spurs me on to continue the fight. We might not always get in, but we can knock on whatever door we find ourselves in front of. Write now I’m knocking on the writer’s door. With impeccable timing, one of the blogs I’ve pinged back and forth for the last couple of years, Domestiphobia, wrote a picture accompanied poem about that worth reading.
That same inner voice that keeps my legs moving on long runs is the one that encourages me daily to sit down again in front of my laptop and continue:
Just finish this last mile and you’ll never have to run again. You can give up on this book, but don’t give up on this page, complete this one last thought, click those keys until the story inside of you is alive on the page.
Today, after a week of this, I can step back from the individual pieces I’m carving and start to glimpse a hint of the whole. It’s a long ways away from the vision in mind, but it’s something. Progress I guess.
There’s an assurance I’ll get to the end of this, but for now, I have a month of borrowed time to try to get there, and so I’ll keep clawing.
