Well folks, it’s the New Year. We made it. I hope Christmas found you all good and well, and I hope that the New Year brought all the celebration your heart desired. But I will say, I bet it didn’t top mine.
As most of you may know, I am currently in Zambia, and though I’ll be leaving in a couple of days, I have so much to tell you about. But to start, I want to share my New Year experience with you.
Just some background information before we start: I have been living in a village about an hour outside of the town area of Livingstone, in my tent, spending my days with the village kids, playing and tutoring, and experiencing village life. We don’t have Internet, the electricity only lasts so long, and if the water runs out we have to start the pump by the river to fill up again. I love it.
So, our New Year’s Eve started like most other Sundays. We woke up and prepared for church. (If you ever come to Zambia, find a church to go to one Sunday, because it’s so much fun. Never before have I run around a church dancing and singing in a language I don’t understand.) We spent the afternoon relaxing, mentally preparing for having to write 2018 on things instead of 2017, because, let’s be honest, no one is going to get that right for the first 3 months. Once dinner had come and gone, we were given time to spend with the kids from the children’s home on the property. We played games and made bracelets as a little pre-party to the celebration. And then the real party started. We lit a campfire, set off fire works, and sang and danced. At one point some of the boys decided to flip their shirts down to their bums and do some African dancing around the fire, which was both fascinating and hysterical. The dancing, though, I think was my favorite. Here we all were, kids and adults alike, singing songs in the village language, and dancing around the campfire, under the stars, on the Zambezi where crocs and hippos frequent, in the middle of Africa. And it was here that I made my only New Year’s resolution for this year: to never make another New Year’s resolution. There are a couple reasons for this.
Firstly, I realized how much these people live in the moment they’re in. We live in this American-created mindset of being so focused on the future or so stuck in the past that we have a tendency to miss what’s going on around us, and then when it passes, we miss it, keeping ourselves stuck in not living in the current moment. Here everyday is about that day. Yes, there’s some concern for the future, but it’s not their focus. You ask some of the kids in the morning what they’ll be doing that afternoon, and they say, “I don’t know. Maybe play football.” They just live moment to moment, and I love that. I have loved living without the stress of trying to answer questions about the future, or feeling like I have to have everything figured out. I’ve learned to truly be thankful for the day I have today, because that’s my only guarantee in life: the time I have now.
My other reason for my resolution to not resolute is because I think I’ve grown far too accustomed to making resolutions to do things I want to do, and then not doing them, as if making the statement is enough to make things happen. I think I came to this realization because I never made this New Year resolution to travel the world; I decided I wanted to chase a dream and I did it. I think it’s so easy to have a desire to do things, but push them off to a ‘new year, new me’ list, and then never actually chase after them. If there’s something I have a desire to do, I think I’ll just go for it. I think that’s one of the things I’ve slowly been learning on this trip. I don’t want to be someone who sits on a dream waiting for it to hatch on it’s own. I want to chase after it with diligence and perseverance.
So there you have it folks. I think it’s safe to say that this holiday season is one for the books. And Reed, if you’re reading this, don’t worry, one day we’ll spend a New Year’s together.
I wish you all well, and many best wishes on this new year. I hope it’s a good one.
