If you were to ask folks how you go about creating a family, the most common answer would almost certainly have something to do with marriage and sex. Sure, there are other ways to start a family, like adoption, but given that adoptions only account for between 2-4% of American families today, it’s no surprise that most answers to how families are made would have to do with sex. That’s how most people start a family, after all.
There’s one big problem with this, however. Sex makes babies, but sex doesn’t make relationships. Relationships take work. They require commitments and responsibility. They require communication and attention. That’s true of all sorts of relationships from friendships to dating to marriage, and it’s also true of parent-child relationships.
That may not sound like a shocking statement. Of course relationships take work. But think for a moment about the fact that nearly every relationship you’ve ever had, outside of family, had to be earned. Many people, certainly not enough of them, sought to build trust before they moved from a serious relationship to the commitment of marriage. Even in friendship, people gain and lose friends all the time, and often, those relationship statuses hinge on things like loyalty and reliability and reciprocity. You get to choose your friends and dating partners, and you are likely to base those decisions on positive qualities. In fact, the only exception to this I could come up with was co-workers, but even those relationships hinge on certain expectations. You might not be able to get rid of a terrible co-worker as easily as you wish you could, but your co-worker still has responsibilities, theoretically, that they must fulfill in order to keep their job.
So, what makes the family different? What makes the parent-child relationship automatic? Blood-relation?
The reality is this: we’ve been socialized to believe that if a baby comes from your womb (or your spouse’s womb), that automatically forms kinship. The baby becomes your child for no other reason, really, than the fact that it shares your genetics. Of course, sharing genetics can be a powerful bonding factor. When a mother goes through the task of carrying a child to term, there exists the genesis of a bond even before the baby is born. And yet, genetics, blood, or carrying a child to term cannot guarantee how “motherly” that mother may be to the child. Nor can it guarantee how present or active a role “Dad” will take. If it did, we wouldn’t need a foster care system. And with 35% of American children being raised in single-parent homes, we have to be careful about suggesting that biology or genetics make it more likely that the bonds of kinship are secure. They may be for one of those parents, but not necessarily for both.
So, if blood doesn’t make you family, what does? I think it’s worth noting that the word “conceive,” a word often used during pregnancy to denote family-making, shares synonyms with words like “imagine” or “think” or “understand.” I would add “choose” or “adopt” to that list. And I’m not talking about legal adoption. Sure, legal adoption is, certainly, one way to start a family. But think about what legal adoption symbolizes: it is a process by which a person voluntarily accepts, by choice, to take on the responsibilities of parenting.
Not every parent has to go through that legal process. But every parent who wishes and deserves to be called a parent – a mother or a father – has to voluntarily accept, by choice, to take on the responsibilities of parenting. Or to say that more simply, if you want to be a parent, you have to “adopt” your kid.
That still may not sound revolutionary. So, I’ll close with a story to shed some light on what I mean:
Let’s say, growing up, Billy Bob had a set of terrible biological parents. They performed the menial responsibilities of parenting: they fed him, clothed him, gave him shelter. But Billy Bob was never really accepted. Occasionally, he was beaten by a drunk father. At other times, his mother teased or harassed him in an abusive way. Now that Billy is all grown up, his parents come around occasionally, making demands of him, still treating him like a second-class citizen rather than their son. Billy has every right to stand up for himself, most would say, but he doesn’t. His reason? “They’re my Mom and Dad. What am I supposed to do? Get rid of them?”
Biology too often answers Billy Bob’s question with a firm “No. They’re your parents, and unfortunately, you’re stuck with them.”
Adoption answers the question by asking, “Did they earn the right to be called your parents, the same way all other relationships have to earn their keep?” To be fair, different people may answer that question differently. Perhaps their role in feeding, clothing, and sheltering Billy Bob is enough reason for him to feel the need to reach out and give way to their demands. But the point is, Billy has a choice. That’s what adoption puts on the table. And the harder Billy clings to the narrative that blood relation is what makes you kin, the less likely he is to realize that he does, in fact, have a choice on who he calls his parents. Divorcing himself from the family is not easy, just like kicking a bad friend out of your life isn’t easy, but holding a family to stricter standards of what it means to be family – essentially forcing them to adopt you – could deeply redefine kinship in a powerful and positive way.
It would probably be better to title this, “The Ten Ways I’ve Changed in the Last Two Years,” because I doubt that it’s fair to say what role Peace Corps did or didn’t have in the ways my life has drastically shifted. But those changes took place here, in Morocco, within the context of hearing the call-to-prayer five times a day being constantly reminded by what I eat or how I speak or what I see that this isn’t America. So while some of these changes were the result of outside forces, they were only understood within this very specific context. I’ll try to speak to that a little.
Anyhow.
Why a top ten list on the ways I’ve changed, you might ask? Maybe it’s just that I’ve changed that much. Or maybe it’s just my need to reflect on the impact of this experience. Every once in a while during my service, I’d come across a volunteer who would say something to the effect of, “Oh, well, this isn’t really your life; I mean, this is just two years; it’s so temporary, so it’s not who you really are.” I disagree wholeheartedly. The fact that there was a time-limit on this experience didn’t negate the impact of the experience. Morocco will go with me wherever I go for the rest of my life. I’ll carry it with me secretly at times. Other times, I’ll share stories out loud, to the annoyance of everyone in the room. But the experience is mine, and it’s carved the direction my life seems to be taking these days. All the more reason I need to understand it the best I can.
Finally, a word about the words below. It’s a top-ten list, so it’s kind of like a countdown, but I wouldn’t say any of these changes outweigh the others (except maybe the last few). They all sort of flow together instead, which brings me to my next point: I don’t mean to imply that you’re going to see me back in America and suddenly be like, “Wow, Philip’s changed so much.” Most of these changes are related to the way I reflect on life and understand it. So, it’s all interpersonal brooding. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a ten-minute conversation with me would have you saying, “Geesh, Philip Eubanks hasn’t changed at all.” My sometimes sardonic wit still shines. I’m still very much socially awkward, and if anything, now I’m both socially awkward and lacking any hygienic sensibilities. But I think the people who spend real time with me will see something different (not just smell it). And I don’t know what that looks like exactly or just how different it will be or feel once I’m through the reverse culture shock that is quickly approaching. But I think the people who really get to know me, if they knew me before, will see that I’ve changed, and that it’s been a good change.
But enough on all that. Without further ado, here’s just a few ways I currently feel different.
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10. I’m a cook. I love cooking. And I’m not too bad at it, either. Peace Corps gives you all kinds of time on your hands, and very few processed foods. I suppose if I had wanted to, I could’ve spent two years jumping from house to house eating with Moroccan families, and in fact, I think most families would’ve absolutely loved having me over that often. But with all that time and all the vegetables you have to figure out how to manage from scratch, it’s inevitable that you’ll learn how to cook. So, I’ve got a few favorite recipes. I love doing soups, especially a tomato soup, and I usually mix in carrots. I’ve gotten incredibly good at whipping up a French roux, or making curry dishes. Then, of course, there’s always “Outat Tacos” or ravioli with the pasta and the cheese and the sauce all from scratch (this one takes a while). And Avery, before he left, got me into making lentils on a regular basis, and I’m tellin’ you, I can cook up a mean set of lentils like nobody’s business. So, yeah, there’s something kind of awesome about picking up cooking skills in two years. You could say that the Peace Corps Recipe Guide might be the single-most important document I will bring home to America aside from my passport. No joke. But sadly, I won’t be returning with the knowledge on how to cook many Moroccan foods. I mean, most of them, I could easily figure out, especially with the recipe book, but it’s just hard getting an in with a Moroccan woman who is comfortable letting a boy hang out in the kitchen. I might try to finagle my way into the kitchen at my landlord’s house. We’ll see.
The one Moroccan dish I did learn how to cook (and even helped to cook with a friend named Abdelcreme) was the tajine. I uploaded this video a while back, but here it is again if you’d like to know how to cook a tajine:
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9. No fear of failure. Peace Corps is really a lesson in failure. I mean, you have all these twenty-somethings show up right out of college gung-ho about changing the world, and then they get into the thick of it and realize, “Oh, I don’t have the language to navigate this country’s insane bureaucracy, so I guess I’ll just stay in my house and read books.” I don’t mean that to be a critical statement against volunteers who give up and do that. The bureaucracy almost killed me on more than one occasion, so I have complete respect for anyone who tries even once to battle this ministry or that just to do one ounce of good in their community. I also don’t mean to suggest that Peace Corps is just some joke of an organization. To the contrary, I think in my two years, I saw a lot of volunteers doing a lot of good things, and despite all my efforts not to become one of the technical assistance do-gooders, I guess I had a bit of an impact myself. But it wasn’t an impact without its obstacles. I can’t name you the number of hours that all I did was sit and wait for someone’s stamp just so I could hand out glasses. I can’t name you the number of times I was told “inchallah” when it meant “no.”
You know, we came here not to just do what we wanted to do but to help our community do what it wanted. That was part of why it became so frustrating at times when you had people voicing, “We want this,” or, “We want that,” but there was always one official or another in the way of making it happen. And usually, that official gave you some menial task sending you out of his office, only to be shocked later when you showed back up in his office with, “Okay, I did what you asked; what’s next?” And sometimes, no matter what you did, it was still met with a “no” in the end.
I feel a little like I’ve been rejected and told “inchallah” and “no” so many times that they’re just the norm. Life here wouldn’t be right if I wasn’t having to jump through those hoops. And all the failure made the few successes we had all the more exciting. So, yeah – I’m not afraid of getting turned down anymore. It just means I get to try a different angle. It’s like approaching life through the goggles of a mad scientist. Everything you do is “trial-and-error” with the hope of perfecting the trial. You come to expect your experiments will go wrong with a kind of curiosity that asks, “I wonder how big the explosion will be this time,” and when you do stumble upon an amazing scientific discovery, you realize the best ones happened by accident. That, my friends, is working with Peace Corps in the developing world… in a nutshell.
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8. A patience with sadness rather than a rush to anger. Along with failures comes patience. If you don’t learn patience in the Peace Corps, you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on hour five of sitting in a room during a baby-naming ceremony (isboura) doing absolutely nothing; it doesn’t matter if it’s hour three of sitting on a sidewalk curve waiting for a taxi to fill. Life moves little-by-little, and you will learn patience, even if you thought you were already the most patient person in the world. You’ll have it all tested over again here.
I think when I showed up two years ago, I had already undergone this shift toward recognizing that I had some serious anger issues. Maybe it was that one email I fired off to a former boss comparing their new hire with Hitler (that one came back to haunt me for a while). Whatever it was, I had a knack at opening my mouth and saying really cutting things and immediately regretting it.
That patience I mentioned, though, has slowed my anger significantly. Sure, like anyone, I still get angry, but I’m quick to warn people ahead of time, and I’m quick to apologize afterward. I’m also less likely to fire off an angry email or explode in your face unless I earnestly feel I’ve been wronged. I think for far too long, I carried around this mentality that made me think of myself as some sort of modern-day prophet telling too many folks why they were wrong. Such is the nature of an opinionated person, I suppose, but – and maybe this has more to do with getting older and, well, giving up – nowadays, I just sort of shrug my shoulders, recognize that I ain’t gonna change the system, and then I huff-and-puff and resign with a sense of sadness.
And I think that’s actually a good thing, you know, being sad instead of being angry. There’s more humility in it. It leaves open a door that recognizes how wrong I could be, even if I don’t feel wrong. So, maybe what’s changed in me isn’t so much my temper but my willingness to try to look at every situation from the standpoint of as many perspectives as possible. And that breeds a humility that holds my temper at bay, too.
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7. How I understand Relationships. I used to say – and I think this is true still – that college and graduate school is a really selfish time in our lives. I mean, you go to school specifically to better yourself. You major in something specific to what you want to do for how much money you want to make. You’re learning to be independent for the first time, which requires a lot of you-time. It’s a time for dreaming and following your dreams, and that doesn’t always leave open lots of doors for sustainable relationships, and I’m sort of talking here about the so-called “significant other,” but I think that statement is somewhat true for friendships and family, too.
I started to feel during my Peace Corps service a little like all my friends had chosen this settled down lifestyle, watching all of them get married or have children or get into serious relationships, and meanwhile, I was off gallivanting across the Moroccan desert doing my own thing with little time for anyone but myself. None of my relationships, even friendships on some level, seemed lasting, largely because I was focused on following dreams and traveling and not on, well, people other than myself.
That’s not to say that I would’ve been less selfish had I married and settled down. I sometimes wonder how many people have kids just so they can live vicariously through their own little mini-me they created just for the purpose of some giant show-and-tell. Anything can be selfish.
But I can’t say I want to stop living this life of always being on the go with few commitments. Let’s face it, I’m a bit of a nomad, even if that is selfish. I think what I am trying to figure out these days is how to have my cake and eat it too – how to follow my dreams and travel and whatever else while remaining mindful of how selfish that is and trying to find a place that says, “Let’s not be quite so selfish this time.”
I used to either want all the doors open or all the doors closed on relationships of any kind. Nowadays, it’s as if I’m not really closing or opening any doors. I’m just walking. I just want to take a walk.
I’m a-okay if that metaphor makes absolutely no sense.
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6. A stronger sense of Impermanence. Along with that thinking, I’ve sort of stepped into this fully Buddhist notion of impermanence. I no longer have any expectations that any relationship of any kind can be lasting. People die. People change. People hurt each other. Even our notions of God over the past few millennia paint a rather impermanent picture. If the sacred is lasting, we’re incapable of capturing any immutable understanding of whatever is divine. We cannot place our hopes that anything lasts, and you might think that sounds sad, but I’ve come to think of it as very freeing. Rather than looking hard to find or make something permanent out of this life, we can more simply carry a gratitude for the fleeting moments we do have with the people who shortly grace our lives.
That is, I don’t mean for that sense of impermanence to carry with it the kind of fatalism that I encounter here all the time, and I think that’s an important distinction, because I think the fatalism of Islam certainly informed my thinking on all the ways life isn’t very lasting. There’s just something about getting into a taxi with no seat-belts, driving 140 kilometers per hour through a sandstorm with zero visibility and trusting that God will either keep you alive (or God won’t), and either way, it’ll be just fine. There were times when I sort of took that attitude on and figured, “Well, if I die in this country, so be it.”
But I don’t think impermanence, at least not in the Buddhist sense of the word, should evoke that kind of fatalism. Living carpe diem cannot mean living destructive lives. To the contrary, our willingness to recognize the preciousness of life should give us pause and help us grow thankful for the time we get. It should demand we move with care and ease through every walk of life. Or, to restate that, you don’t seize the day so there’s no tomorrow. You seize the day so when tomorrow comes, you can be proud of what passed the day before. It’s like when Gandalf tells Frodo, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil.” Impermanence is something we can trust. It is a kind of permanent state itself.
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5. The Maghrebi in Me. I’ll never be Moroccan, but some part of me will always carry Morocco in my heart. I hate how cliché that sounds, but it’s true. During our Close-of-Service (COS) Conference last week, I read over an aspiration statement I’d written two years ago filled with goals I’d set for myself, and the very first thing I said was that I wanted to build a kind of kinship with this country. I think I have. I think I’ll go home to America and my heart will still be with my brothers and sisters in Morocco. I’ll ache for this Kingdom for a long time. I’ll miss its language and it’s food. I’ve got two blogs coming up all about that in the next few weeks, so I’ll just leave this one nice and short. Next.
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4. The truth about legacies and our need to carve our own path. When I sat out on this journey, it was very much – and still is – about my grandfather, Jewell Francis, who lived in Casablanca for nineteen months during World War II. I admired him and wanted to follow in his footsteps, but somewhere along the way, I figured out that you have to carve your own path. We can’t just mimic the exact same moves of those who came before us. We inevitably find our own way. It’s as if I was thinking of a legacy as a kind of inherited obligation to live like the people you admire. But the problem with that is that we do a disservice to the people we admire when we make them out to be something they weren’t in our admiration for them. I think I adored my grandfather so much that I was remembering the idea of him and not the actual person. I mean, by the way I used to talk about him on the blog, you would’ve thought he was some All-American G.I. Joe movie star riding a camel with a cigar in his mouth or something… I dunno… maybe that’s a bit much. But the point is, he was human. He made mistakes. He carried huge regrets with him throughout his life for some of those mistakes. There were times in my service where I got disappointed in myself specifically because I thought he would’ve been disappointed in me, as if he would’ve been let down by how I’d handled this or that situation, but I think I was holding him on a pedestal and trying to live up to some impossible standard when I did that. In hindsight, he would probably be eager to hear my stories about Morocco, would probably listen intently with an occasional nervous laugh, and he would be deeply, deeply embarrassed to know how much I admired him and how much I wanted to follow in his footsteps. And he would be proud. No matter what. Because that’s what grandfathers do, and he was especially good at that.
At one point, I had thought that I would join the military as a Chaplain after Peace Corps. It was one more way to follow in his footsteps. But somewhere in my service, I realized that I needed to make my own path, and while I think I could handle the toils of boot camp (I know who you are, doubters), let’s face it, that’s not who I am. It’s not the path I need to take, and I can still admire my grandfather and “live a legacy” without having to follow some strict path based on my assumptions of a man so complex I couldn’t have begun to understand why he did all the things he himself did. Maybe he, too, had moments where he was trying to follow his own legacies. Hard to say.
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3. Religion. I’m a theist. I’ll always be a theist. I think it’s absolutely essential that we concern ourselves with questions that are connected to what’s sacred – “the intuition of the universe,” as Schleiermacher called it. But what I regard as sacred has expanded in some ways and contracted in others. Since coming here, for example, I left the United Methodist Church, because I felt the way I saw that Church treating the people I loved was completely opposite to its mission, and I’ll just say rather bluntly that I do have an absolute disdain for much of modern Christianity, if not all of organized religion. I can hear you younger folks snickering to yourself, “Oh look, Philip is just like everyone else in his generation.” Maybe. But I’d like to think that I held out a little longer and tried to fight the good fight, the fight worth fighting until I just reached this point where I had to separate myself from it. It doesn’t mean I don’t still regard it with respect or even love. It doesn’t mean I’ll never go back. But somewhere in there, I got tired of watching hurt people hurt people. I got tired of being one of them. Of course, I know removing myself from what the average Joe calls “Church” doesn’t remove me from what I believe is “Church.” It sickens me, in fact – and always will – how many other people out there got to hijack the definition of Christianity. Contrary to that, I know that hate and bigotry and manipulation are just as bad and just as prevalent in all institutions, not just the Church. I know that, despite its hypocrisy, most religion exists for the sole purpose of welcoming hypocrites and giving them a place they can dwell on something more positive than their brokenness. I know that there is good happening in the Church, because so many people I do care about are involved in making it happen. But I just need my time, need my space.
Maybe that’s weird to say when I haven’t really been involved in Christianity in over two years, but religion has been at the forefront of this experience. It’s been even more a part of my life here than it was at home, and while Islam is quite different from Christianity, you’d be surprised how similar the two felt at times. Whether it was watching Mohamed tell stories about Adam and Eve, or having some seven-year old girl warn you that your prophet is a liar and that you’re going to burn, we’ve sure done a good job the whole world over focusing religion on the exact opposite of what its prophets – liars or not – intended. I think it would be nice, in a way, to go about living life a little like the prophets intended without getting together with other people once a week to have them judge whether or not you’ve lived up to the standards or ideals they had nothing to do with creating, the standards and ideals they still rarely consider on any deep, moral level. If I ever am a part of some form of organized religion again, it will be a place that breeds humility in a way that questions are welcome and even expected. Faith will need to be something engaged, not merely some black-and-white rule book and not merely some social setting where people fight each other for power over the kind of music or the color of the friggin’ carpet.
I don’t think I’ve lost something, though, by setting myself apart from the UMC. I think I’ve gained more than I ever had before in being even more open to acknowledge the sacred in every aspect of human life. I hope – and pray – that I can remain committed to fighting that fight, one that hopes for a day when all our petty differences are set aside for something better.
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2.My Calling as a Writer. When I gave up on Chaplaincy (and a little later on Ph.D. programs in Religion), I really had to sit down and figure out what it was I wanted to do – at least for now. Come this fall, I’ll be applying to MFA programs in Creative Writing. The MFA is a terminal degree, so I could use it the same way I would a Ph.D. (i.e. to teach in the university) without all the ridiculous “dissertating” my poor (literally, they are broke) Ph.D. friends are always doing. More importantly, it gives me a chance to accomplish another personal dream of mine that’s growing into a calling almost – to publish fiction. Now, I don’t know if I can pull any of this off, but I know I’d like to try, and while publishing a book that actually sells would be exciting, I don’t think of it as sustainable. That’s why the MFA gives me an opportunity to do something else I regard as a “dream,” which is to teach abroad. Get me into Al-Akhawayan University as a professor. Or any American-run university. I would eat that up. And I’d be great at it.
So, what changed? After all, I’ve always liked writing. Well, basically, Peace Corps gave me the time to write for the first time ever, and last Ramadan I wrote a 55,000 word novel, and this Ramadan, I made it halfway through a second one. Somewhere in the process of actually finding time to plan out a book, I discovered that it wasn’t just an enjoyable pastime; it was something I needed to do. In fact, I don’t even always enjoy the process of writing each chapter, largely because I’m too eager to get to the next chapter, and it’s just this incredibly burdensome process, but it’s this insatiable desire to get all of my thoughts onto the screen. And I’m not happy with myself until it’s done… and done right.
But it’s not as simple as just doing it and doing it right. There are problems. I’m a writer, so naturally, I don’t really think I’m a very good writer. In fact, I’m pretty concerned I’m not good enough to get into any programs. Case in point, for those of you who have read this far, props to you for battling through my dangling modifiers and my wordiness for, let’s see, we’re up to 4077 words now – wow, you made it this far reading what I’ve written; pat yourself on the back! Was that last mumbo-jumbo even a sentence?! Seriously, though, I know I can throw together a few verbs with some nouns every so often (maybe even with an occasional adjective), but then I read John Steinbeck or listen to David Sedaris and, my God, I’m a terrible, wordy writer.
But, maybe an MFA program can help me with that. Maybe some of it isn’t just talent but skills we can actually learn. Time will tell.
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1. Origins. Eight years ago, I was studying abroad in Scotland, and every Scotsman I met always asked one or two questions into our first conversation, “So, where ya from?” And every time I answered “Tennessee” or “America,” I was always met with the same response, “No, no – where are you originally from? Where does your family hail from?” As an adoptee, I didn’t have an answer to that question. And that semester was spent piling on question after question about my beginnings and where I came from and how I ended up there. I searched and searched to understand “home” and family. While I was in Liverpool, I remember walking upon Strawberry Field, an orphanage John Lennon wrote about in his famous song. I felt deeply connected to that place. Later that semester, I remember that Garden State came out, and there was a scene in the movie that really clicked with me:
“Maybe that’s all family really is,” Andrew Largemann says, “A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.” I loved that image. I latched onto it, and the next few years were spent thinking of family in terms similar to that. By the time I was at Vanderbilt, I was writing about family and kinship in nearly every class. I spent my time as a youth director reminding my youth group that we were a “family.” And even when I was writing my aspiration statement for Morocco, I was still writing about kinship.
Morocco has gave me an answer to those questions about family, an answer that I already knew, but it solidified it for me. I’m a Eubanks. I grew up with Gordon and Frances and Beth and Beau and later Gibson and Abner. My home is Jackson, and I’m an American. And that answer always was good enough.
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So, there you have it. Ten ways I’m different. Ten ways I think differently about who I am or who I was. More to come next week.
This morning, I sat in the cafe next to the taxi station with Caity, Avery, Nicole, and Jonathan. It’s weird. The past few months have been, in some ways, building up to their final morning in Outat. And now that it’s here and gone, none of it seems real. We waited for Caity’s taxi to fill and chit-chatted about some of their goodbyes in their communities, the tears spilt, and the tears that haven’t yet come. In some ways, it was a conversation about transitions. We all seemed to be at this crossroads, but where they were going, I couldn’t yet follow.
I actually had a dream a few nights ago about our goodbye. In the dream, one-by-one, my best friends headed off in their different directions, and as I sat in the cafe, left behind, a million ghosts from my life just seemed to pass by me. Faded, quick-paced images of family, friends, and loves of years before seemed to suddenly appear in the dank, little cafe, briefly linger, and then were gone. It was as if everything around me was in warp speed but I remained in slow motion taking it all in. And then, when I came to, I was just there in the cafe, and everything was in normal speed but nothing was happening. I just sat and watched and waited for whatever came next. So, what comes next?
Sometimes, I think we think of “transitions” as “moving cities” or “graduating” or “a new job.” We regard these moments by the events that characterize them, but in reality, the transitions of our lives are the people who live in those moments. People enter and exit our lives. Some stay for a long time. Some have their time cut short. Sometimes, we’re the ones doing the entering and exiting. Other times, the choice isn’t up to us. And that’s a tricky thing, and it can be misleading. It can make us callous. It’s like we get so used to impermanence that we expect it or even begin to demand it; and that’s where it risks becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy.
I think for too long, I’ve relied on that impermanence and even pushed it. I’ve found false comfort in it, demanded it, and it’s caused me to fabricate this cynical reality of expectations where I was willing to push people away because I assumed they would eventually exit my life anyway, and it was easier for me to be the one to initiate that “exit,” to ensure that I was in charge of my own destiny. On the one hand, there were, are, always have been people I could always call on if I needed them, people like family, who would always “be there,” like sacred promises. But that was a world different from the kind of relationships where the consistency is an everyday reality, where the other person was someone you could turn to, well, constantly, and vice versa. Something settled and intentional. And my failure to attain that consistency made me lose faith in relationship, even in friendship, altogether.
But nowadays, that just seems too negative, too unfair to the relationships I have had and enjoyed, no matter how long or short-lived, no matter how wonderful or how much of a struggle they may have been. I don’t know if that “consistency” in relationship that I used to long for really exists, but I think living life like it doesn’t is a lie. Rather than expecting the worst like a cynic or even expecting the best foolishly, we owe it to ourselves and others to simply love the time we have, open to seeking ways to make that time right. It’s not about making it last as long as it can, milking every ounce of energy out of those relationships. It’s just about making it right for everyone. And I think that looks different for different people, and it’s hard to find that balance, but just a willingness to seek it is what’s important.
Saying goodbye to Caity, Avery, and Nicole wasn’t the heart-breaking moment I feared it would be for that reason. After Caity left, instead of sitting in the cafe forlorn the way I had in the dream, I helped Avery carry his huge, heavy bags to the bus and saw him off the right way. I’ll be seeing Nicole off shortly, as well. None of that is to say that I’m not sad. I am. But it’s their time to go. Soon, it’ll be my time to go too. And that’s the way of things. It’s what’s right, and it’s okay.
So I transition now. Old friends and new will be popping into my life this next month or two, and I’ll be treading carefully remembering what has been before stepping headfirst into what’s to come.
Yesterday, Khalil sat down next to me on the couch and handed me a small multi-colored bouncy ball, insisting that we should play soccer with our fingers. After we set up a makeshift field using a remote control, phone, and a few pens, we “kicked” the ball around for about twenty minutes laughing and wrestling over the bouncy ball the entire time.
The truth is, I can’t carry on a full or lengthy conversation with the kid, though I hope to one day, enshallah. More importantly, I would say I’m discovering that language is wordless. What we say with our eyes and hands, with the way we laugh or smile stretches far beyond our words. That very simple language is the truth to who we are; the moment we speak, something is lost in the duplicitous complexity of what spews forth from our mouths. It’s interesting to think, perhaps, that I know Khalil and he knows me better than we might ever could have had we started our relationship with the same words.
It’s made me think a lot about friendship, about what a person needs to have in common with another person and what truly connects us to one another. Most of my life, I’ve surrounded myself with people who are, at least on the surface, somewhat like me – they talk like me, act like me, listen to the same music or have the same basic life goals. But when I started to realize that we’re all really the same at heart (per my previous post), it changed how I view family and friendship, too.
It’s something I seem to be working through slowly though – you know, what friendship really is in this silly little life.
Case in point, one of my friends here was telling me about a Moroccan proverb that goes, “A shared face is never clean.” Really, the idea there is more related to finishing a task and sharing responsibility, but it’s also deeply connected to relationships. That is, in our friendships and relationships with one another, the success or failure of the relationship is never the responsibility of only one person, but it only takes one person for the relationship to fail.
When the closest American to you could theoretically be an hour away or when the only friends you’ve made in an entire country could be up to fifteen hours away, it really tests how much you value friendship and what you’re willing to do to keep a friendship alive. I haven’t had to deal with this just yet, exactly, but anticipating this coming change can be the cause of some considerable anxiety. In three days or so, I will know where I will be living for the next two years and with that, how far away I will be from my friends. As someone who isn’t all that great at keeping in touch (hello blogger world!), I have to ask, “Can I afford, for my sanity, to be that way here?” I’m not sure. What if I fail at “cleaning” my side of a shared face? What if my friends fail at cleaning their side of our face? How much forgiveness or effort is available before you have to wipe your face clean of any shared responsibility in a relationship?
I don’t know the answer to that, but new people always enter our lives (and I expect to meet many new people, Americans and Moroccans, over the next few weeks, let alone the next few years), and the old ones don’t always exit. Case in point, one of my pledge brothers (also mentioned in a previous post) and I could easily go months without talking and then pick right back up where we left off. But I feel like those kinds of friendships are special and hard to come by. A lot changes in two years. When I’m stateside in 2012, there’ll be babies born, couples married, maybe couples divorced (hopefully not, but it happens), and in terms of friendship, it’s hard to negotiate how you exit someone’s life so drastically and then re-enter it again like you never left. That’s not so much a worry for me as it is simply something I want to understand; I want to be a good friend, but I’m not sure I know how. I’m not sure any of us really know how to do that. In any country.
Sometimes, I think there are people who enter our lives, and we will always cherish the short time we had together, but those friendships were temporary. There are some fraternity brothers or some friends back in Scotland who had a huge impact on my life, but those days have fluttered away, and I don’t long or dwell on that past. I’m thankful for it, brief though it was and thankful for their friendship and how it molded and shaped me. I hope I had a positive impact on them too, but at the end of the day, it’s okay to move on and live in the present. If I get an opportunity to rekindle an old friendship, great, but in the meantime, carpe diem.
For a completely different picture, I think there are also people who enter our lives and belong in our lives, a more permanent picture of friendship. Or a friendship born out of fate.
There’s a story from the Qur’an about a man who came to the Prophet without tying up his camel but wasn’t worried about his camel’s safety because its fate was “in the hands of God.” The Prophet told the man to go back, tie up his camel, and then and only then would its fate be “in the hands of God.” Even the friendships or relationships that are “born out of fate” require that we work at them and share the responsibility to keep the friendship alive. That’s just life, and if we aren’t willing to work at it, everything falls apart. It doesn’t matter how much fate or destiny or the hand of God help out if we aren’t also willing to love and forgive and work at our relationships with one another. So maybe that’s the moral of the story; that’s friendship.
For these next two years, many of us are separated by time or distance or money or the past, but while I can’t predict our future (and have no desire to), I will trust that I’m willing to try to wash my side of our face, and I only pray for the forgiveness you’re willing to give me should I fail at that. God-willing, I will extend the same kindness to you.
