This Moment

21 August, 2008
Let me tell you about this moment.

It’s Thursday, mid-afternoon, just past 3 pm. I spent my morning exploring the local “big” town, the district capital about 20 minutes away. The sprawling town is still decidedly smaller than the “big” city of Koforidua that I grew accustomed to living near this summer. I was able to pick up a few necessities during my walkabout, including matches and kitchen knives, but I’m still headed to a nearby market day tomorrow to find other (more edible) goodies. I’m at site for good as of yesterday, which means sitting happily alone in the little blue-painted cube I now call my own. Aside from shopping, the biggest accomplishment of my day was treating a new mosquito net with insect repellent.

In the background of this moment I’m listening to the Olympics in Beijing via BBC World Service, bounced to my corner of Ghana from Ascension Island. I had to look at a map for that one, by the way. My world feels both very small and very big, and I’m not sure where I fall in its Big Picture. The change in routine this past week left me with parting gifts: a stuffy-headed, sore-throated cold, uneven sunburn, mysterious insect bites, and copious amounts of exhaustion… but even so, I’m ok. I find myself breathing deeply, relaxation trickling into my toes. Here, now, I can sit - and simply feel, breathe, hear, be. Tomorrow the frustration can return, next week the exasperation may take hold, and sometime soon I will return to feeling helpless, hopeless, and fed up. So be it; those moments will come on the coattails of their own stories. It is this moment I want to share. In this one, as the second hand ticks slowly around my dusty clock’s face, I am smiling. I am content. I simply… exist.

Life is good.

“If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh