Imagine this..
Tomorrow marks the start of fourth year for you. Well, not exactly tomorrow. School reopened two weeks ago, but neither you nor the lecturers have been in much of a hurry to return. Your lecturer is still enjoying her trip to Pemba and Zanzibar, casually telling the class rep to reschedule lessons for “next week”. Meanwhile, you’ve been losing your mind, twisting and turning in a worn-out bed in your newly reassigned hostel room.
This is the final year of your campus life. The past three years were quiet enough, but this year feels heavier. Unlike before, problems from home have crept in to join the academic pressures. That’s why you left home early, fleeing at the first sign the semester had begun.
You’ve been in the hostel by yourself since the previous evening. And now, at the start of the weekend, it’s eleven in the morning. Despite convincing yourself otherwise, you’re still a little tipsy from the few bottles you downed last night in a fog of depression. A succession of small bits of bad news have been coming in over the past three days or so: someone at home is unhappy with your performance in school and life in general; the friend you owe a huge debt is breathing down your neck on every corner you take; you have no money for food for the weekend other than a-month-old stale bread and a packet of noodles; another friend is accusing you of not caring enough about them; you still have unpaid fees and more than three units of retakes to tackle mid-semester. And then, the final straw, someone you very much hoped to see for the weekend cancelled on you abruptly with an unconvincing excuse about a cold.
You try to keep the different strands separate but eventually, in the stillness of the small hostel, they coalesce into an overwhelming impression: you’re unworthy, despicable, there’s something wrong with you, you’re ugly inside and out, destitute, you’re not ready for graduation or the workplace, you’ve been like this since the start, no one likes you, you’re going to die alone, unhappy and mediocre. The impression is stronger than you are. You curl into a ball and can’t hold back a tear, which rolls onto and is absorbed by the faded-grey pillow. Ten minutes pass, then another twenty, thirty, fifty. Finally, you can’t take it anymore. You have to pull yourself out of this spin before your peers return from holiday.
With a newfound urgency, you grab your jacket, run downstairs and head for a walk. You step out of the school compound but immediately reconsider—the dust chokes the air, and the matatus barrel past because each trip is a gamble with death for them. Reluctantly, you turn back into campus. At the gate the watchmen glance at you with a knowing look, as though your troubles are written plainly across your face. You can’t even summon the strength to return the gaze, let alone force a smile. The campus is almost deserted—no one returns this early except first years, parading their flashy outfits and oversized crocs. Apart from them, the school is silent. The heavy canopy of trees spreads over the buildings and over you, as if to mirror the weight you carry.
Kabete is thick with trees. So many that campus often feels cold. Yet on hot days their shade makes it cool and serene. Scattered beneath the canopy are picnic benches sheltered by parasols, where students usually gather to relax, blasting Indah and Odongo Swagg from their JBL radios. But with most yet to return, the parasols stand quiet today, and for once a bench waits empty. Just what you need.
You sit, and immediately your mind starts to drift. Like if this dense cover of green around your school was laid out by a group of enlightened planners a few generations ago, or did nature simply have its way. There’s a small memorial plaque on the table of a man who pioneered research into accounting. You wonder if that person wrestled with problems like yours. But more importantly, you begin to realize the vegetation around you has a very little idea of you.
It hasn’t heard of your family troubles, your rejected internship applications over the holiday; it doesn’t have any views on your romantic life; it couldn’t care less whether you are alive or dead. And the ignorance, far from crushing you further, has an immediately soothing effect. The siala tree towering nearby that has been sitting patiently in that spot for a hundred and fifty years at least, has priorities blessedly far from your own—it’s drinking nutrients from the soil, it’s showing its freshest new leaves to the sun, it’s providing a nesting place for robins and an athletic park for monkeys. Its indifference is a gift.
The indifference is not nature’s alone: another comrade sits on another bench a few feet away with a flask of tea. They might later be calling home to tell them they need money for their hair or for the course registration. Farther ahead, the school football team is doing warm-up drills on the pitch. Their sweaty bodies gleaming in the afternoon sun. Their warm-up is intense but joyful; they make playful jokes as their sprint up and down the pitch. Closer near you, a few first years are dancing to TikToks on the cabro-paved car park. Their laughter and joy are unabashed, screaming love and self-esteem.
Overhead, a plane—perhaps heading back from Dubai or London—is locking onto the final approach beacons at the airport to the east. “That’s unusual,” you soliloquy, “planes rarely fly over Kabete.” In the distance, a line of uncomplaining pylons march electricity from Olkaria to power hairdryers and Play Stations. Our strange, extraordinary, bathetic species—full of glory, complexity, and mundanity—goes on, gloriously ordinary.
With all this in view, it suddenly seems not to matter quite so much that you may (or may not) be a wretch; that a lover has let you down (heaven knows they might have their reasons and you aren’t perfect either) or that you should in all fairness probably make more of an effort with your studies, even for one last year. The individual ego diminishes. You let yourself dissolve into a wider realm. What happens to you for the next one year no longer has to be the measure of everything. Your story is not the whole story. You are in part also the trees, the clouds overhead, the pigeon who has come to peck at a leftover smocha, and the first years hugging after a perfect TikTok take.
Your ultimate fate no longer feels like everything. You rejoin the ocean from which you had been in frightened exile for too long. What does it matter so much what you’re worth or where you’ll end up after campus? None of the elements around you that have helped to recover your balance care to articulate a theory of existence. They may have one nevertheless: the siala tree has its own distinctive silent take on love, achievement, success and power. As do the clouds, the robins, the monkeys and the benches. Each one of them is whispering, very quietly indeed: open your heart, let go of your resentments, surrender.
Yes, you may end up alone, you may be foolish, you may be sad. None of it, the trees in Kabete will tell you, might matter too much anyway. We’ll cope after all. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll meet that comrade at the bench again—she could one day be a friend, a colleague, a business partner. Perhaps tonight you’ll go to the cinema alone, or share a drink with a stranger.
You start to realize you are so much happier when you manage, for a time, to still the clamour of the ‘I’ and live less intimately with yourself; when you stop insisting that everything that happens to you must say something profound about you. What matters, in the end, is not what the world says about you, but how lightly you can wear your fate.
For the first time in days, you smile. You rise from the bench, ready to return to the hostel with a renewed spirit. You remind yourself of the lesson you promised back in first year: be yourself. You haven’t just taken a walk, you’ve discovered how the quiet indifference of trees, benches, clouds, and strangers can offer a powerful antidote to despair.
✍🏽Reagan.