I got asked out by a girl for the first time last night. And I said yes.
Let me back this up a little bit: here on the World Race, we’re all about demolishing cultural stereotypes . . . but maybe not in the way you’re thinking.
December is women’s ministry month, maybe better known as Womanistry month (I personally cannot stand this awful car wreck of two perfectly decent words, but I’m in the minority here). That means that until December 18th, the ladies of Y-Squad are living and working without our men, here in South Africa. They’ll join us for Christmas, and the upcoming end-of-year debrief; but for now, it’s Estrogen City, population: 34 (plus a few cats, cobras, millipedes and cockroaches thrown in.)
And we decided right out of the gate that we were going to be a community of women defined by the way we served and cared for each other.
Get more than three girls together, and the natural assumption is that both fingernails and tempers will be lost. Well, we wanted to defy that – so on our first day here, we received a challenge from leadership. Ask one of the girls out on a date. Nothing fancy, you’ll probably use a rock for a chair. But set apart time and space to learn more about someone of your choosing.
Shrena, the doll of a woman who called dibs on me, picked me up from my tent Friday night, took me to a picnic table covered in wildflowers, lit her only candle, and drew slips of paper from a heart-patterned coffee mug.
“I asked squad-mates to write words on slips of paper, and figured we could take turns picking slips to start conversation!” she laughed, and I could only shake my head in awe.
I reached into the mug and chose a small square of notebook paper, unfolding it between my thumb and pointer fingers.
FAVOURITE MEMORY.
“What?! I can’t even begin to pick one!” I laughed, leaning back against the picnic bench, my eyes searching the night sky.
The first thing to pop into my head was something I hadn’t thought about in a really long time: a memory, years old, that I had with an ex-boyfriend.
“Alright, I have one,” I smiled. “It was the first thing to come to mind, so it must’ve been for a reason, right?”
I forget exactly what day it was.
But I remember that I was 18 years old, and that I was wearing a sundress. Green and strappy, the skirt hitting just below my scraped knees, the rest of the fabric covered in a pattern of yellow wildflowers.
My first boyfriend was a boy named Phillip, and at the time we had only been dating for a few weeks. Per my mom’s rules and per the unspoken rule that as the oldest child, you are guinea pig for your parent’s overly-involved ground rules, we were only allowed to spend time together in the presence of friends or family.
This was immediately a hassle, and I don’t need to tell you why other than that we were in love. I didn’t know a lot about the word at the time, but I knew in my guts that I loved this kid. I couldn’t go thirty seconds without my mind wandering the curves of his face, or his gentle, shy hands.
On this particular afternoon, we sat obediently in the living room of his parent’s house, watching brothers and sisters mill around, everyone there trying to pretend that we weren’t worth keeping an eye on but also very much aware that at the smallest opportunity, we would dart away like cats.
Finally, a moment came. Whispering frantically, Phil guided me out the back door and to the corner of their property. We plunged into the underbrush, branches and thorns scraping our cheeks and arms, finally emerging on the other side into the sunlight.
The elementary school baseball field and playground looked just like any other baseball field and playground, but on that day, everything was covered in a radiant, golden glow. The air was thick as honey and the wild summer grass grew high and itchy around out shins, and I started running, calling back for him to try and catch me.
Of course he caught me. He held me by my waist and swung me around and around before we finally collapsed underneath a crooked tree, laughing while trying to catch our breath.
In that moment, we were the only two people in the world.
After we broke up at the end of the summer, I packed that memory away like a wedding dress, certain that I would never need or want to return to it again. It was over, I reasoned, and it held no more value to me. Dark clouds rolled in over those two kids alone on the playground, the sweetness and innocence of that Saturday stricken with the present reality that we were no longer those people. The memory didn’t matter. It was gone.
Shrena listened quietly until I stopped talking, her face warm and gentle.
“It’s funny how both of our memories have to do with men,” she smiled, recounting an evening years ago when she and her ex-husband came home to find several bottles of frosted white wine on their doorstep, a gift from a neighbour, and cooked a quiet dinner in the kitchen with nothing but laughter and jazz music between them.
As we sat at that picnic table, we noted something strange: in spite of both relationships failing, neither of our recounted memories hinted of bitterness.
It’s taken me several years and an 11-hour plane ride to Africa to come to the realization that just because a person is no longer a part of your life, it doesn’t mean the beautiful memory you created with them cannot remain beautiful. That just because heartache and pain came later, the pain doesn’t need to inform that perfect moment when you were unapologetically happy, when heaven touched earth, when you were in love and wore the glory of it like expensive jewelry.
I’ve re-read the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse every month so far on my Race, and one paragraph stands out to me more loudly each time. Siddhartha has lived most of his life in search of his identity, moving from place to place, person to person, trying at every intersection to put his “old self” behind him and move on. He’s an old man living next to a beautiful river before he finally comes to this realization:
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
Instead of viewing life as a series of chapters to be written and closed, he understands life as something much more fluid: a river. A series of moments that each inform the next, a continual, uninterrupted stretch of days all adding up to a life.
As Christians, we know that our “old selves” have been buried and our sins forgiven in light of the cross. But how many times have you done something stupid, vowed never to repeat the mistake, only to find yourself doing it again at some later point? We say things like, “That wasn’t like me, I would never do that again,” and then we do. The shame snowballs and we try to draw deeper lines in the sand, dividing our pasts from our present and future, instead of having grace for our humanity and looking for ways to grow through it.
It’s been five and a half years, and I still think about that day in the field and can feel my chest grow warm.
And you know – I think that’s okay. I think it's okay to remember, because remembering and staying stuck are two different actions. I’d like to think that if that boy ever finds himself thinking back to that particular Saturday, that he also takes a pause and finds a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.
I've spoken with too many divorcees, owners of failed business enterprises and permanently disabled men and women to concede that a life lived in a state of perpetual forgetfulness is, in a round-about way, a life unlived. Because when it comes down to it, time - an illusion or not - is all we really ever have.
Instead of viewing life as a journal to write in, flipping regretfully past old entries and circling back to smudge out certain lines, maybe we should see it as a river: a body of water where we each come to spill our glass full of moments like water, all running together, and always moving forward.