No Children

It's taken me a whole year, but I finally figured out the secret to lovely, stress- and heckle-free running in Shyorongi:

If you can't beat them, get up so early that they can't be bothered.

The constant swarming, screaming, and heckling I was getting from hoards of school children every time I would hit the trails for a run or a walk had basically driven me to the point of staying inside by the end of last term. I hated letting their stupid choices affect my own, but honestly, as much as I loved to be outside, it just wasn't enjoyable anymore. I go hiking for peace and a slice of nature; instead, all I was getting was full-volume screeching and a desire to dismantle my fellow human beings.

And then this term, a flash of brilliance: School kids love to sleep! They do it in my class all the time! They complain constantly about waking up early! Ipso facto, very few oiks would likely be roaming the hills of Shyo before they absolutely had to be. I tested out my theory this last Monday by getting up for a run at 5am. It was dark, but not pitch black, and by the time I got to the downhill stretch (where I need to be able to see where my feet are going so I don't further muck up my ankle) it was full-on dawn. The surroundings were more beautiful than ever, everything was fresh and crisp thanks to Rwanda's night rains, and, best, best, best of all,

no children.

I only saw six (adult) people on the entire run! And not one of them called me muzungu; they all just addressed me with a nice "good morning", almost as though we were both just regular people, instead of one regular person and one blanched freak. The run felt great, and I was back before 6am. I went three more times this week, and I've pretty much figured out that getting up at 5:20am so I can be out the door by 5:25 gives me the perfect blend of light and solitude. Term Three will be full of these runs! Watch out, Bay 2 Breakers 2011.

Note: If you haven't heard the song No Children by The Mountain Goats, hear it now. Learn the lyrics, and sing them at the top of your lungs with your family.

Beyond the Sea

From the newest addition to my top five books, Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez:

It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven't the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed. The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.

Among men, it seems historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.

We think these historical waves may be plotted and the harmonic curves of human group conduct observed. Perhaps out of such observation a knowledge of the function of war and destruction might emerge. Little enough is known about the function of individual pain and suffering, although from its profound organization it is suspected of being necessary as a survival mechanism. And nothing whatever is known of the group pains of the species, although it is not unreasonable to suppose that they too are somehow functions of the surviving species. It is too bad that against even such investigation we build up a hysterical and sentimental barrier. Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for it we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find outselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, the universes in our cells.

The safety-valve of all speculation is: It might be so. And as long as that might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, "It might be so." Perhaps his critic, being not so wise, will say, "It is not so. The picture is damned." If this critic could say, "It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter," that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment.