apples in the summer are golden sweet

I hear it over and over in my head, day in and day out: standing in a rowdy line for tacos, sitting behind miles of Yosemite traffic, baking below the California sun at work, holding my phone high hoping for even one service bar, trying to fall asleep inside my tent while the neighbors' metal blasts through thin canvas walls. I hear the low, strong voice of an old woman climbing slowly into the back of a roasting hot bush taxi. "Kala suuru!" she barks at the muscular young men demanding she hurry up, adjusting piles of faded fabric draped around skeletal shoulders. "Kala suuru," she states again, easing with a sigh into a minute crevice between people on the jagged bench seat. We roar off, dust billowing in our wake.

"Kala suuru, kala suuru, kala suuru," I chant internally, chewing the tip of my tongue as I feign interest in the complaints of my peers and park guests, most often about "poor food choices" or "the heat."

But a nasty, bitter anger rolls in my stomach before I can stop it. No matter how much I hear it, how much I try to remember, the fact is that my patience wears thin these days.
They say that reverse culture shock is harder, and so I expected to struggle. What I didn't anticipate, probably foolishly, was how lonely it would feel to be back on American soil. I'm so much closer to my support system, to my family, after all.

Now, it is increasingly apparent that I am becoming readjusted to the States. Last week, I successfully grocery shopped without becoming irrationally angry at the peanut butter aisle, for example. But my longing for Niger, the friends I made there, the experiences I simply should be having, never leave my mind. Day in and day out I fight for patience, primarily with myself, and day after day, I fail. I wish I could say that I am better, but I must admit in the interest of honesty that I am still no where near the person I thought I was, and that it brings me to tears with embarrassing regularity. Finding patience in America is a different battle all together than in Niger.

Then again, everything is different all together than in Niger.

In Africa and Europe, which is to say in the past year, I had come to accept patience as something akin to faith. That is, patience at its core requires a person to operate in trust that the future will be different while she is still unable to see how it might be so. Perhaps it is the pace of life here, or because our needs are so fulfilled that our reasons for dissatisfaction are less tangible, but my foreign definition unravels as I attempt to wrap it around this new life.

Most often, my patience falters in my interaction with Americans. While my list of complaints about the culture that spawned me are seemingly endless, the root of my problem can be described in just one terrible word: apathy.

Several weeks ago after a long day of hiking, a couple of friends and I had come together for a pizza dinner. Conversation bounced around in areas of shared interest and knowledge until we came across a subject about which I knew nothing; the two began speaking about a celebrity of one sort or another, who had a book and a television show that I have never seen. Apparently appalled by my ignorance, these friends balked. "You've never heard of [insert name here]!" one barked in a volume that my affronted pride interpreted as shouting. The other jumped in next, equally disgusted that I should be so lame. They both laughed, and I was left feeling tiny and embarrassed. I can only assume this was their, perhaps unrecognized, intention. How dare I be so ignorant! Surely something must be wrong with me to not know [again, insert the name I can no longer recall].

I read an article once in TIME titled "Why We Care" with a large photo of Tiger Woods after his marital scandal stole the news. The author opined that our collective addiction to this celebrity culture was a symptom of the segmentation of our society. Naturally, we crave a subject we might discuss with anyone, a shared knowledge base in our increasingly niche-obsessed culture. We talk about these things because it is easy to do so, because we can assume that most everyone has seen "The Hangover," for example, or that even the woman in front of me in line for tacos will have formed an expressible opinion about Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse. Sure, with our close friends we might delve into deeper conversational waters, but amongst acquaintances and strangers, when grasping for subjects to fill the Fearsome Silence, we land in the shallow, albeit dramatic, lives and works of celebrities. Here, we can share our thoughts free from most worry of offending our company since most of us have little actual investment in these matters.

It seemed a logical argument, and so I've remembered it, but it provided little comfort that evening. As I nursed my bruised ego, I wondered to myself about the endless subjects about which my company knew little, and I couldn't help but to feel a bit arrogantly comforted by my travels and the breadth of my recent experiences. I'm not proud of the reaction, but it nevertheless allowed me to rejoin the conversation with less hesitation.

The same friends who seemed to regard me as small and ignorant that day are just as quick to cut off most statements I make about Africa. No one will be able to relate, I habitually remind myself, kala suuru, and I return to my lonely musings. But the matter stretches far beyond disinterest in the unrelateable, and I'm becoming exhausted with simplifying it thus. It is a matter of apathy. When it comes down to it, most of us care very little about poverty or desertification or malnutrition or illiteracy, blessed as we are to be unbothered by them. Even the exceptionally poor in our country enjoy amenities such as electricity and clean drinking water. While I can "kala suuru" the crap out of long lines and crowded buses and the broken community clothing dryers, I am simply not yet able to have patience with such apathy or the blatant, deep, dangerous ignorance it forgives.

Particularly not when I am made to feel embarrassed for my lack of knowledge in other, less prevalent subjects.

This is not an affliction of the developed world. While in Europe, and certainly while living in Ireland, I rarely needed to include my rehearsed explanation that Niger is "a country in West Africa north of Nigeria" in discussion. Common also was the knowledge that Niger is incredibly poor and suffers annual food shortages. These are things reported by the BBC, after all. Perhaps the geographical education systems in these countries surpass our own. However, it seemed more effective that a belittling similar to what I endured for my unfamiliarity with [aforementioned celebrity] might be applied upon different sorts of ignorance abroad. With so much more international interaction, and thus increased understanding that a world is swirling outside their borders, there exists a sense of responsibility to be informed about said world.

And you will be shamed if you are not.

What's the difference?

In Niger men drink tea. Around the village during the day, I'd come across small collections of men in shade, sitting around a metal basket of glowing charcoal with a tiny green or blue teapot balanced atop. The men came together and spoke, even if their discussions seemed sparse or of little consequence. In Ireland similar groups formed but around pints at the pub. We'd share stories of the day and of the island and mostly just babble nonsense, but we came because, people, we need each other! This social need, the desperation we feel to be part of something, to be recognized and thus valued by individuals outside of our immediate lives, spans continents, and so I've gathered it is part of our nature. But in the States we seem to have lost connection to such social endeavors. In our massive, segmented society, we interact with coworkers, friends and family in safe, private ways, but we often don't have an equivalent setting in which to be with people we don't well know, but yet somehow know.

I've been a regular at coffee shops since I was sixteen. With my best friend in high school, who has now settled in L.A., I'd drive to Louisville on Saturday afternoons to order absurd coffee concoctions and watch the people walk past. We tried many of Louisville's extensive coffee shop locales, but ultimately settled into just one, where it came to be that I no longer needed to specify my regular order. In college, I was often teased for the reliability that I was at the MT Cup after and between classes. There's something so wonderful about being recognized by the other regulars, these people who have no ultimate impact on my life, I guess. To be honest, I'd never much thought of it. But maybe this is what I was seeking: a place where people knew my name, or at least my face. As I've wandered this past year without such a place, I've felt distinctly more lost. We regard privacy so highly here, expect it to such a degree, that we've grown comfortable being anonymous in generic locations. We'd rather people just leave us alone and are bothered when they don't.

We aren't comfortable around each other, and we've forgotten how to listen. We can be apathetic to the plights of individuals beyond our immediate circle because, well, they're easy to ignore. Change the channel or flip the page, click a different link, and you can assure yourself that the life you know is the only one there is. Most people would rather not listen to stories to which they cannot relate or to which they might not know how to react, and well, as my grandma would say, you don't learn much with your mouth open.

Living sans a sense of our place in the larger community, much less the world, allows us to be apathetic. And we're allowing each other, and ourselves, to be ignorant.
A stranger asserted to me last week over my morning coffee that people don't read anymore. "That's why the country is in the state it's in," he declared. "We're not paying attention."

Well, no, we're not. It's impossible to care about the whole world, and it's painful to watch everything that's falling apart. We worry about those things which immediately affect us, and if we manage to manage those things, we feel damn good about it. As we should; we're all not just carrying heavy loads, we're juggling them. We're multitasking our lives away, forgetting how to relax, and never considering the necessity of patience.

So even if we do sit down in the company of people from whom we might learn, we're texting more people, checking our email, listening to music and in general running each other over. Even when we have a chance to listen, it no longer feels like we have a chance to listen. Just a second, let me check my facebook....

It overwhelms me, this pace of things, and I can't remember the last time I sat down for tea. Perhaps Yosemite living is more so this way, desperate as we are in every moment of precious sunlight to be doing all the wonderful things at our disposal that we feel guilty for sitting. But what a shame, surrounded by such majesty, that we should feel obligated to ensure our personal lives are competing. We grow so concerned with our ability to climb the hardest routes, trek the longest trails, prove ourselves the fittest and fastest, that we forget even amongst the mountains and raging waterfalls and towering trees that we are tiny and humble. Ultimately, we are at the disposal of the natural world and not the other way around. If we had control, what need would we have for all this patience?

William Berry didn't call it patience, but he nonetheless knew what I mean: "We spend great energy in mental processes wishing things were different than they are. Wishing the traffic jam didn’t exist. Wishing the boss were a little nicer, wishing our children would take our advice, wishing, wishing, wishing. Acceptance is a key to a happier life. If we can just try to accept what is, and that wanting otherwise is often wasted energy, we will be happier. We would be better able to experience the moment more fully with this state of mind."