For the past few weeks, I keep revisiting one moment from Kenya in my head. We’d just finished a week long trip with the Hadza, camping in the Yaeda Valley in Northern Tanzania. The group had two options for travel: ride the truck back down a road for a few miles, or follow a narrow trail down from the outcrop we’d been on top of with a few Hadza guides. Several of us took the latter route and meandered down a frustratingly steep and narrow trail, dotted with thorns and rough brush and sand covering the rocks making it easy to slip. After about an hour we emerged from the foliage to the plains.

Living out here, I can sometimes pretend that the brown Colorado grass is the same, but in truth its not. Imagine emerging from a forest to a near endless plain. To the left and to the right was the beginning of the hills that spot the Yaeda valley. Across in the distance the Rift Valley began. But in between was a several mile long stretch of long grass burnt green by the sun and parched from the last rainy season.

Our immediate inclination was simply to run. Put plainly, I’d never seen such a wide expanse of grass, and it felt like a funny vestigial instinct just to set off across – for something on the other side, to get out of sight – it’s hard to say. We walked as a group for a few hundred meters but then suddenly found ourselves splitting off without meaning to and without telling one another. It simply just felt right to keep walking at different angles. After a few minutes we were all just specks to each other, standing in the middle of flatness, the heat and humidity I’m sure blending to feel over 100 degrees. Once you got a bit father out and had the sun hitting you from every angle, for it seemed to be at every point in the sky you turned, it grew to be hard to see, and even to sweat. It felt as those all water had been sucked out of you into the ground, as if the grass and the cattle from the Barabaig nearby needed it more.

It was at this point that, on impulse, I simply took off all my clothes. For no reason at all other than the fact that I was in the middle of the longest stretch of open field I’d ever seen and despite the fact that I was shielded by absolutely nothing, I was nearly invisible, because so far away from any person.

In a high stress, long-hour job, I think, it’s not rare to frequently imagine oneself elsewhere, if only as a mental escape from a physical surrounding. And while I’d done my fair share of day-dreaming over the past few months, it seemed odd to constantly keep coming back to this place. But I’d recently started rereading Out of Africa and came to this: “People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interferences from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.”

Such a statement is ironic, too, in the way that so many colonists walked into Kenya with the exact opposite sentiment; the country, all of it, was of their concern, Kenya’s destiny intertwined with their own intentions and aspirations for it. This of course has only been a thought acted upon by an influential few, but influential enough that Kenya appears the way it is today.

But I realized, too, it was exactly this freedom that I’d been missing and thus craving; a landscape created around me without my touch or control. The openness of Africa is unlike the openness of anywhere in the States. Here it can still easily seem as if one has influence, despite the grandiosity of the place, as it is always America, a familiar place, controlled by a familiar and single language that anyone with some rights to power has access to speak, and so to change.

In Africa it is the exact opposite – so fragmented by landscape and language that one is left powerless and in awe of it. It was this freedom of will that I so craved because in my classroom it was the exact opposite, the will of the dictator who had not just limitless control but also the lives (both academic and social) quite literally on his hands. I am my kids lifeline and chance for opportunity more than any other individual; what they dream it is my job to shape. Coming back to that plain was little more than a reverie of escape, a mental buckling of my knees under the weight of such pressure as the future of my students. And should I feel guilty over such buckling? Or is the escape something I need to keep going?

After the truck reached us at the bottom of the escarpment, we hopped on and began the four hour trek back to Arusha. Along the way we past a Barabaig with his cattle, some four hundred at least. Somebody spoke out loud: “That guy’s rich. That guy’s a millionaire.” And in the context and environment in which he lived, he was. And truly, I’d felt the same way not a few months before, not because of the objects I owned but because of the time and lack of will that I possessed.

A Rilke quote that I’ve thought a lot about, mostly in regard to time: "Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."

I’ve considered Rilke over and over, and agree with it in its fundamentals. I think everyone can drum up a time in their lives when it applies well. But I think the reaction is one of two: you either grow from the experience and look back upon it fondly, or you find that it’s not a position in which you can grow at all.

It would of course be a lie to say I will not grow from this job; in hundreds of ways I already have. But it’s not in ways that I’ve always longed for; it’s not in learning more or changing my mindset, but in acclimating to twelve hour days and in understanding how a twelve year old best understands text structure or fact and opinion. It’s a growth of knowledge at a level that has always remained fundamental to me, and therefore from which I derive so little satisfaction from, as if I’m being asked to repeat high school and just have to do extra work. And while it has its rewards in the day-to-day interactions with kids, I can’t escape the feeling that that Barabaig is richer than I am for he has everything he wants. Give me unlimited money, and I should only ask for unlimited time.

Which is why I miss being on that plain now, because with the rush of heat and light, everything else, including sound, seemed to shut down. The group who had come by truck grew mad at us because it took so long for us to get back to the patchy dirt road, so far away were we that we either didn’t see them or didn’t hear them shouting for us to return. There was nothing else I needed in that moment; it was all the time for which I might ever ask. If I’m going to have nothing in my life but work, I’d just as rather have the feeling of nothing at all.

What I’m really saying is this: all I want for Christmas is a robot who can grade my papers and pack my lunch.