Patient Impatience & The Loud Silence Of The Karoo

I used to despise coming to the Karoo: a semi-arid dessert in the middle of South Africa. It is timeless, vast, dry, empty & most importantly devoid of the worlds I wanted to experience as a kid. My mind was in Azeroth: pre-occupied with the beautiful, snowy landscapes of Dun Morogh & the Hinterland adventures with the Wildhammer dwarves.

However, as I’m growing older, the emptiness tunes the noise down to solitude. Here, in the flat vastness, away from the winding streets of the city & the proverbial other, my thoughts don’t need a GPS to find me.

I feel I need to be here. I need to sit still & not race to more people, cities & ideas. It’s exactly the opposite of what I’m about to embark on: 4 continents, 8 cities, 1.5 months of travel. There’s healthy anxiety with travel like this (“oh shit, will I make all the trains & planes?! I hope I don’t bomb my speeches!”), but I feel there’s a rising sense of unhealthy anxiety: the feeling that it will end up just being another detour towards where I *should* be going.

I’ve always had an uneasy sense of urgency. It’s my consistent, faustian poltergeist: always telling me, paradoxically, to not enjoy the moment because time is limited. Although, at 28, it’s lead me to new lands, people, experiences & material things that I’m incredibly grateful for, it always lingers, shifting me away from my presence.

Another month & a half will be gone & I would not be spending it thinking about the things I need to. Before I become the final key that life will cut me into, what opportunity do I still have to change? I’m afraid of rushing towards some door of life & not having the keys I need. Venkatesh Rao in his ever eloquent metaphors writes:

“The trick to Act 2 is to recognize that Act 1 was mostly about turning into a key. Even if you didn’t realize that at the time, and thought you were doing other things like Pursuing Happiness, Making Money, Finding the One, or Making a Difference. You were actually acquiring the set of cuts and notches required to be a key.

Which is required to become fully human.”

As the full moon rises with my dad sitting next to me, the silence becomes louder and the bonfire behind us becomes white noise. The stars drip from the skies as Antoinette Pienaar writes in ‘Kruidjie Roer My’.

All my thoughts: pasts, futures, lovers, friends, family, deaths, ideas & places come out from the shadows & they join us, staring at the same moon & fire. I sense my dad’s thoughts are here too.

I’m not listening. I’m not listening to the stories being told in this timeless landscape. I struggle with my patience & it seems to have reared its head into its final form: an increasing impatience with my own impatience.

The only way to feel okay is to sit in this silence, and let it become loud. It’s not to see the uneasiness of life as colours washing together to grey, but colours washing together to become a sunset. Here where it seems grey & dry as you drive past, you just have to wait to see the beautiful colours.

It’s apt as I share these feelings with a new friend & she replies with a quote from Rainer Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I need to learn to be patient with my impatience.

I need to find home when I wander & wander at home.

I need to learn to say more with less.

I need to learn to take away the notes in my music.

I need to learn to stand still when I’m dancing.

I need to learn to live the questions, not the answers.

I need to listen to the loudness of the silence of the Karoo.

My nieces calls me back from the horizon. They want to play ‘Ogre Ogre’ on the trampoline. Azeroth is in the Karoo: here where I am. Tears well up.

“Our tears are telling us something key: that our lives are tougher than they used to be when we were little, and that our longing for uncomplicated niceness and goodness is correspondingly all the more intense.”