Tag Archives: home

Joy, Work and Home

Ideas, ,

I am reading Le Guin again. The Dispossessed – my favourite of her books. In the strange limbo of relocating to a new city, it seems appropriate. It feels like home. That strange, slippery concept of home, always just beyond my grasping fingers.

In Le Guin’s fictional anarchist world, the language has only one word for work and play. They are the same word, the same thing. Today felt like that for the first time in years. It feels good to come home to the work that I love. After Korea, after so many months of doing work that was not mine. That work was work. It was counting the hours and getting through the days. It was living for the weekends when I could put on my red boots and pack my little backpack and see new places and discover new things. Or spend hours in coffee shops and bars and discover friends and acquaintances. Not that there was anything wrong with the discovering and the travel and the friends. But the work hours felt wasted. Work has always been central to who I am, to how I enter the world. I lost that for a while.

Today I felt like I had found it again. Today I sat for hours, hardly noticing time, and the words and the numbers danced and played and became the thing I wanted them to be. But not just any words and numbers. Words and numbers about the things that I know and love. Things I think about just before I sleep and when I wake up in the middle of the night. The things that engage me, like food security and development and poverty and aid. Words and numbers that are ideas made tangible. The visible parts, the bits that are useful and relevant on the page right now, but that are part of a bigger picture, of a slowly twisting whirlwind of ideas about security and poverty and development and hope.

There is a joy in doing real, hard, relevant work. Thinking work. Work that is bigger than who I am, that is part of a larger moment, part of a giant, swirling atmosphere of ideas. It feels like being connected to that ethereal whirl of ideas. Like spending a day of hard, intense work dancing in and out of that mist of thoughts to catch in your net, just the right concepts and phrases and arguments for now.

This work, the work I love, is not just a part of who I am; it is my home. This whirling unreal reality is where I live. It is where I thrive, where I find the energy to keep going, to keep doing. It is where I meet the people who excite and inspire me. It shouldn’t be called ‘work’. It should have the same name as play. It challenges and energizes and stimulates me as much as the rush and the swirl of debate.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel differently. Perhaps one flurry of thoughts is only the illusion of a whirlwind. Perhaps ‘home’ is as ephemeral as that exquisite moment when all the words dance into place with a gentle sigh of peace. But that is a beautiful place. Home is an idea. It is a difficult, fleeting idea for those who have chosen against the settled comfort of suburbia. Perhaps the compensation is the thrill of an intellectual-emotional home just a wish away from the work that, if you are lucky, you do each day.

The movement of people

Ideas,

I watched a debate recently about colonialism and reparations, specifically Arab colonialism in Africa. Combined with my recent brushes with the colonial history of Namibia, it got me thinking about the movement of people.

Did you know, for example, that the first inhabitants of Madagascar were probably Austronesians who sailed on canoes from South East Asia. The malagasy language apparently shares 90% of its basic vocabulary with the Ma’anyan language from southern Borneo.

Zanzibar fell, in 1698, to the Sultanate of Oman (who displaced the Portugese) and became an important part of the Omani empire, from which several areas of East Africa were controlled. In the 19th century, the then Sultan of Oman decided to make Zanzibar his permanent residence (capital?) and built lavish palaces and gardens there. For a while, Zanzibar was the capital of Oman.

The Andaman Islands between the Indian sub-continent and Thailand/Indonesia are populated in part by the Jarawa tribe who, it turns out (confirmed by DNA testing) are direct descendants of North Kenyan/South Ethiopian early man.

People have always travelled to and settled in new places. It is only in the last century, as our political correctness has shut down the option of conquest (at least for Western nations) and our population growth has driven us to claim whole countries of land as our own, for fear that we will be left with nowhere to go, that this kind of travel and movement has become less acceptable.

But I am still intrigued by nomadic groups, not because their lifestyle is somehow romantic and desirable – as modernity isolates them more and more, they often live in abject poverty – but because they are the antithesis of the sedentary lifestyles so many modern humans live. We have become strangely obsessed with a settled place. “Where are you from?”, “Where do you live?”, “What is your address?” But at least in socio-economically well-off circles, people’s lives exist largely on-line. Sending letters in the post is almost an anachronism but an address remain a crucial part of identity.

I have lived in Korea, I’ve lived in South Africa’s two biggest cities, I’ve lived in small university and farming towns. I’m currently in the Eastern Cape but the office I work for is in Cape Town. It is a little like the time I lived in Cape Town but my office and team were in Joburg. Or those crazy three months I commuted between Stutterheim and Pretoria. And I’d like to do it on a larger scale. I’d like to spend more time travelling across borders, particularly in Southern Africa. I want this whole region, rather than just one country, to become ‘home’.

In the back of my mind a whimsical idea is forming: what would it be like (and would it even be possible) to live without a fixed address for one year?

The joy of home

Adventures, Namibia

Some trips are more intense than others. It’s the more intense ones – whether emotionally draining or just intense because of the constant movement – that bring the greatest relief and joy at being home. Sometimes even when “home” is 12000km from the place you long to be.

I got back from nearly 3 weeks travelling in Namibia on Monday. Yesterday was my first full day at home. It wasn’t a particularly productive day (although it should have been). I pottered around and did ordinary things that felt like luxury all of a sudden. I had a long, hot bath. After weeks of (mostly cold) showers, soaking in a hot bath felt amazing. You’d think a year in no-bath Korea would have broken the attachment I have to baths but the reverse has happened – I am more keen on baths than ever but now they’re quite a distinct symbol of luxury.

I ate salad. When I was travelling, I wasn’t eating out much so was either throwing together cheap, quick options at backpackers (ramen noodles ftw) or eating tournament food. There wasn’t a lot of salad. And I love salad. So yesterday, I made myself a large bowl of salad with butter lettuce and basil and rocket and fresh mint and rosa tomatoes and baby cucumbers and blueberries and balsamic and olive oil and cheese (CHEESE :D). Travelling food is not always enthralling, particularly when travelling in a country where the food traditions have almost entirely the same roots as one’s own. The kitka was good though.

Other fun things about being home? Soft but firm pillows. Being able to do laundry and then put it in the tumble dryer (because home has missed the memo saying it is summer) and forget about them  for hours and hours. Watching mindless TV programmes for an hour or two. Uncapped internet on my laptop. Finally catching up with all the emails from the last few weeks. Clothes other than those I’ve worn and re-worn all this time. Ditto for books. And did I mention the cheese?

I wouldn’t give up the travel for anything but it’s great to take a deep breath and just relax into enjoying the things that are lovely and luxurious and unique to being home.