Spinning

I've spent the last 2 years making my way through "New Daughters of Africa" edited by Margaret Busby. It is a biblical (it's 1000 pages not including the contents and introduction) anthology of stories, poems, speeches, essays and prose written by Black women between pre-1900 and 2018.

On page 700, I am 5 pages into a story by Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian American writer. She's chronicling her experience of sitting in a café in Florence, Italy and watching an East African man walk into the street and begin to spin and fling his arms about, whisper, then laugh to himself, move around uncontrollably and haphazardly, before quietly continuing down the sidewalk. Mengiste compares this man, a possible survivor of the death-defying migration from his home to Europe, a journey that often becomes the definitive experience for a person, to Lazarus from the Bible. Two men with an intimate relationship with death, who, nevertheless, lived. In making the comparison, she writes this about Lazarus (and by extension, our East African man):

But to assume that he became worthless once he stepped free from his grave is to shrink his life down to its most significant moments. It is to believe that nothing else can possibly matter after so great a feat. It is to embrace the idea that we are, all of us, simply beings relentlessly pivoting around the same occurrence, trapped by the enormity of an important event, as if it is both the sun that guides us and the darkness that leaves us spinning in uncertain space.

Reading that, it really did occur to me how much of life is spent just gravitating to THE THING. The thing that'll give you purpose (or money or fame or awards) or that'll prove that you fulfilled your purpose. What happens when you deconstruct the notion of "purpose" and decide that just living day to day and acknowledging the people around you and the moments you have with them is significant enough?

I think I'm finding out?

I've decided not to spin around the axis of an event or a moment (or a film or a project or an accolade) that will become definitive of who I am and what I do. I'm cherishing all the mundane moments, savoring the people and the experiences, and not obsessing over the accomplishments (to the extent a Nigerian is capable of).