Wake up to the sound of wildebeest snorting on the Saranghetti; smell pure air; feel the dew on the tent as you step onto the cold grass, listening to the boiling chai as the sun crests.
Watch that same sun set in Eyl, and fall asleep nearby, and wake up before sunrise, and pray, and just sit there for an hour or two, listening to the seagulls, watching the smoke rise as the sun evaporates the water on the shore.
Rent a beach house in Mombassa, stay there, live; a mango/avocado smoothie on the beach.
Go to BOSASO & visit Ikram.
Go to BORAMA & visit Bashir.
Go to GALKAIYO & visit the LB Clan.
Spend a week or two in baadiye, no phone, no nothing, just memorize Quran & disappear from the world, and read books, and write, and follow the camel herd.
Go to Uganda & visit Capt. Gordon & Derrick from TGL; have some real Ugandan Avocados from the vine.
Stay at the downtown Hilton in Nairobi and casually stunt / but in a humble way. Accidentally meet the woman of your dreams and sweep her off her feet and get married that same week.
I’m sure all of that sounds sorta plausible, but that last one is a bit fantastical. The timeline for true love is unpredictable. You don’t plan for love; love hits you. You can plan for everything else, though, and my how I have planned. But Allah is the best of planners.
I guess it’s hard for me to reconcile my immediate needs with my ethereal. Is that the right word? Let me simplify it so I don’t lose myself: I have immdediate physical desires, but I also have long-term intangible desires. Between the two there is overlap and there is also distinction.
There is no measure for a good place to raise my children, to protect their future, their geopolitical standing, their religion, their culture, their education, their health, their upbringing, their safety, their everything. Still, I want it all.
Everything that I wished had been planned for me and my generation, basically, is what I’m trying to maneuver for my future children. A lot of people don’t have a choice in when they have children or where they raise them in this world. I am in a fortunate enough situation to be able to pick and choose my battles. I have seen a lot of the world, and a lot of ways of raising children. I’ve come to the conclusion that I want my children to be global citizens. I don’t want them to get stuck with a singular mentality, whether that mentality is of a Western nature, African, Eastern, what have you.
I would want for my children to have every possible advantage that they can so they may lead healthy, fulfilled, stable lives of knowledge and piety. That is my dream, but only Allah SWT knows how it will all play out. I guess I know that what I want isn’t very important in the grand scheme of things. My body is here, and it has needs and wants, but there are things which drive men to do far greater than they would have ever been capable of on their own.
One of those things is a legacy. I have been in this game for a long time now, chasing down the potential woman of my dreams. I have assumed up to now that the woman was the missing piece, that it was simply a matter of finding someone compatible. What I probably could have stopped to ask myself is: what is really holding me back from pulling the trigger on a marriage? Easy answer: an existential crisis.
I am fighting for the hearts, minds, and souls of my future family. It’s not just my life on the line. I live my life now as if I already have a family. I make sacrifices now so that we will be prepared to face any eventuality in the future.
A lot of my people love immediate thinking and putting full reliance on God. I would have no problem with that, were we to apply then concept correctly, and were we still in the Somalia of old, where all of these issues which we must now contend with were moot points. As it stands, we no longer stand on our own shores. We are transnational beings, trying to find a sense of place, time, solidity.
My claim is this: why not accept our transnationalism? Why try to force ourselves into places which no longer suffice? I ask myself, having come from there and here and there and here again – where is home?
Home is the road. Home is between, that liminal space. Home is not anything real, or even imaginary, but rather something in between.
Home is wherever my family is, and that often means home is straddled across the globe. Home is a series of bridges and latticeworks; home is the ties which bind.
Home is what I call this [ ] space. Home is what I feel when my favorite recordings of Ramadan Quran take me to another place/time. To a peaceful state. To transcendence of physical being and a place where I was once ultimately hopeful. And no matter how hard or hopeful things get now, listening to those old tapes takes my heart to that same space.
It’s the unseen work which yields the most precious results.
It’s the unsmiling folks who feel the most.
It’s the patient doers of good who will be ultimately successful – in this life and the next. And I strive to be among them. I strive to be home, wherever that is – and home is certainly not here.
So what can I say, man? Other than I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be in my progress and I thank Allah for that. I thank myself, too, for putting in work. For confronting the unreconcilable. For staring off into the distance and still walking forward. Alhamdulillah.
So to find a wife isn’t the real issue. To find an ideal situation to raise self-respecting children is the issue. And the rest? Well, that’ll take care of itself. This is bigger than me or my desires. This is about the future, and the future must be protected for our children.
Our children will be the guardians of the future-future, so we must protect that future for them until it arrives. Until then, I put my trust in Allah and put my left foot forward, my right foot after it, my head to the sky, my palms turned up // wide.