Upon Return

Comfort with Discomfort

Corn fields and clouds, Ka Home, Lesotho

We flew home to Canada from Lesotho almost a month ago now. Our experience there was incredible. We learned so much about TB, about the history and realities of Southern Africa, about ourselves as a family. We came back with Basotho blankets, pointy hats and inside jokes.

Well my bags are packed, I’m ready to go.

Now the kids are back in their old schools. Mahli’s on call. I’ve been flying up North for TB clinics and seeing patients at West Side. We’re back to the life we knew. Happy to see people we love. Happy to find the comforts of home.

But returning is harder than leaving. You come back changed to a town that hasn’t. The new landmarks and language, the culture and connections you were so desperate to learn now have no local application. The family drifts off into its own activities. If people are interested, they’re not sure what to ask, you’re not sure what to share, so you boil down to generalities, to an anecdote or two.

As for the pleasures of the familiar, they’re real. A comfortable bed, a closetful of clothes instead of a suitcase, unfailing WiFi, good peanut butter. Life is nice and easy. Too nice and easy. Away, something as simple as driving to work seemed like a new adventure every morning. Back home, autopilot takes over and you hardly notice you’re going anywhere at all. Time speeds up again, blurring by like an over-travelled highway.

At the same time, when you’re a visitor you aren’t completely real. You’re ephemeral, trying on a life like an actor tries on a character. All of your relationships, no matter how rich, are coloured by the temporary. It’s flirtation with no question of fidelity.

There’s nothing novel about these feelings, and it is a luxury to have them. Going from fruitful but rootless explorations to the ordinary life of home is a liminal space, the disorienting feeling of not belonging where you were expected to belong. What do we bring back from away? What did we leave behind? What did we find missing upon our return?

And in that space, you wonder whether you ought to re-root or reroute, to touch down or find somewhere else to float away. We gravitate toward comfort, but it’s in discomfort that we learn and grow. When the return of the routine threatens to choke that growth, back in the real world, how can we continue to find enough novelty in the normal to feel alive?

Landing by the lake, Northern SK

In this in-between moment, and with a couple of longer writing projects that need to move forward, I’ve decided to spend less time on this Substack for the summer. In the fall I’ll be back with a new project and a lot more content that I’m very excited to share. Until then, I’ve paused all paid subscriptions and will be reducing the frequency of posts. Thank you for reading along with our adventures these last few months. See you in the real world.

---

We met a lot of amazing people in Lesotho. Two of our favourites were Retsepile, our colleague from PIH, and her husband, SABC journalist Ntate Raps. Here’s his story on the recent snowfall in Maseru, first time they’ve seen snow in the capitol in over a decade (and we just missed it!).

---