digcultrhet: Positioning the Past

Stellenbosch University

I first went abroad in 2003. Stellenbosch, South Africa was a gorgeous wine town on the Western Cape that had beaches, vineyards, and mountains beside townships, poverty and remnants of Apartheid. I had come to participate - to attend Stellenbosch University while teaching in the Kayamundi Township and wandering around town amidst thatched roofs and an endless array of flowers and people.

I wanted to learn and help, to experience a new culture and try to contribute to the community building initiatives ushered forth in the wake of reconciliations. And I did! I traveled and taught, read and drank, played with children and adults, and vastly expanded my previous world-view. I stepped outside the knowledge of the page and lived and listened to what was happening around me.

Yet, as much as I came to understand the world around me (or tried), I also experienced moment, limit, and through that, freedom.

I had been struggling with my own type of reconciliation, piecing together my past to try and make sense of a possible future - - a little compulsively. I was book ended by potentialities and positioned in the between, partially unable to fully ‘be’ in the present while hounded by the past.

But in a moment of epiphany, on a beach ‘between’ an ocean and a mountain – I recognized my limit and was reaquainted to my Location and Time.

On vacation with friends, I woke up one morning and went for a run while the house was still sleeping. Storm clouds were rolling in and the sky was dim and fractured with sporadic rays of light as I walked down to the crescent beach – determined to run the whole of it before the encroaching downpour. Of course, I was right at the halfway point when the rain started to fall – at first, fat, warm, heavy, drops every few seconds, but quickly the intervals shortened and I was soon running through waves of water from both above and below.

It was the best run of my life. Euphoric.

The previous day a friend and I had climbed Table Mountain, wandering through ravines and crevasses as we discussed the past and future. The entire run I had been reflecting on our conversation, but as the rain started to intrude upon my rhythm, 'little and large drop,' I just started running. Through the sand, through the rain, fully in that moment aware of my surroundings – in the NOW.

When I finally returned to my starting point I was drenched and reconciled – reflective but repositioned.

And ready.

I sat on the beach in the rain knew where I needed to go and what I needed to do.