I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained this. The real reason that we’re here in Africa is that we’re trying to learn how to live. I mean really live.

It’s good to help children who are alone, who are vulnerable; it’s worthwhile to speak up for desperate widows or women stuck in sex slave work; it’s important to be with people about to die alone and to touch them and remind them they are loveable and human.

I get to be part of all these things. But I’m too selfish to really be here for any of that. I’m mostly here to save my own skin. I’m here to learn how to live.

The Torah, with its brilliantly simple language, says people have a choice in how to live: it’s a choice between living for “life and death, or blessing and curse.”  Sounds simple, but then why did the writer still feel the need to give us the right answer in the next sentence? “Choose life,” he says.  

I’ve learned, in recent years, that I am naturally inclined to choose something a little less than true life. It’s too much to call my natural way the way of “death”, but I know it’s not what the Torah calls true life.

Naturally, my instincts are madly driven by the erratic, fickle opinions of people, they are driven by the need to attain security and independence (mostly in the form of money, position, and control), and they are driven by my desperation to be happy. These things naturally drive me and guide my choices in life.

The life such choices created for me, wasn’t impressive. It was marked mostly by anxiety (people never seemed happy enough with me) and the draining of my energy toward getting (money), consuming (anything good), comforting (myself). Others have also experienced something similar and named it a Rat Race.

It’s a life, but it’s not really life.

We saw something different here and so we took a chance. True, we didn’t need to come to Africa to do this. But here we are anyway! We’ve been successful in some ways. We’ve failed in others.

I’ve been a bit shy to write about this search in a public forum. But it’s what’s on my mind, so maybe writing about it here will help me make some sense of it. I’ll try to write more about this.