A day of travel, planes and airports completed. Then I stepped into the evening air of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, moist with the exotic breezes of the Indian Ocean.
What does it mean to arrive?
As if one has ‘made it’. As if the journey was merely an inconvenience between here and there. As if something was complete. No, to arrive is to start, or rather, to start anew. The journey continues.
The best arrivals are accompanied with warm greetings – and so I was. Chilwa Kiliaki, once a friend of a friend and now a new friend, waited almost an hour for me to emerge from the airport. Greeting me with a sign and a smile, we hugged immediately. She had prepared the way and took me to my hotel.
And so here I am in the Lutheran Hostel in Dar, thousands of miles from home. As if journeys are to be seen as going and then returning: home and away.
But that is such an unsatisfying point of view.
On this long day of travel I can’t help but think about the many journeys of my life. Indeed, I can’t help but rethink the old analogy of life as a grand journey.
Looking back I see this strange zig-zag path: a mish-mash of career shifts, changing objectives, new friends, different views on life, etc. My path could be that of a drunken soldier on a crooked road lost in the dark.
C. S. Lewis once wrote upon arriving in heaven or hell a person would look back on their life and see a straight line leading directly there. I see what he means. When I look back, the zig-zags fade and I see a straight line leading to right here and right now. Someone recently told me this is like tacking in a sailboat: the boat must go back and forth to overcome – no, use – the wind to get to its port of call. I have felt this before in my life – when what from this vantage point I was off on one of those side paths. It was a straight line to that place, too.
Maybe this is what that ancient prophet meant by ‘the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.’ We just need the perspective to see it.
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