Polepole: Year-End Lessons from Tanzania
This is the new sign that crowns my bulletin board. It’s pronounced poh’-lay poh’-lay, and it’s the Kiswahili word for “slowly”. It’s come home with me from the fabulously immersive two-week trip to Tanzania I just took with my Mom.
Polepole is one of the bits of Kiswahili that have made it into frequent tourist usage (along with, of course, hakuna matata, made internationally famous by the Lion King), but it also seemed to be quite frequently used among the locals throughout our trip in a whole bunch of ways that I’m taking to heart at the end of 2022.
It was “polepole” when we were looking for animals on game drives, slowing down and stopping in place to wait and see if a far-off wild resident might come closer to the road—and they often did, like this cheetah who sauntered right up to the road by our vehicles.
It was “polepole” when we had a schedule to keep, but we pressed pause on it to watch a mama elephant with her tiny and rare twin babies or lions prowl across the plain to take in views that also provided us with some spectacular scenery.
It was “polepole” when Adam and Wolfugan (our group’s fabulous naturalist guides and drivers) were carefully navigating rougher dirt roads to bring us amazing sights like a pile of playful lion cubs or a pair of baby cheetahs.
It was “polepole” when we were escorted out of our tents by the staff at the various camps where we stayed inside national parks. We were sleeping inside these parks without walls between us and the wildlife, and anytime we had to move around the camp after dusk, our flashlight-armed staff escorts walked us carefully and slowly where we needed to go. The lions and hyenas and hippos and leopards that we heard wandering outside our tents didn’t have much interest in us, but we certainly didn’t want to surprise them. Intentional broadcasting of our movement and no sudden dashes were definite requirements.
Polepole meant going slowly in the tropical heat and humidity of Zanzibari jungles and beaches.
It meant gathering to savor the sunset on our last night in Serengeti National Park.
It meant leisurely meals enjoyed as a group, three times a day, whether they were boxed lunch picnics or table service restaurant dining, or a breakfast spread out in the Serengeti after a sunrise hot air balloon ride.
Polepole meant not rushing through experiences to stick rigidly to a set timetable. It was a talisman of a word that reminded me that we would see what we would see, and that while I was on this journey (the Kiswahili translation of which is, yes, safari) through protected parks and roadside communities alike, I should be focused on what was around me. Not looking only through a camera lens or thinking ahead or ignoring the unromantic imperfections of a country undergoing a serious drought along with widespread poverty.
There was very little wifi on this trip, which certainly helped with being present in the moment and with the sense of complete immersion. It also helped me get more into the polepole of it all. If a website took a while to connect, I didn’t find myself impatient about it. I was halfway around the world on a big adventure of a trip with animals I’d only seen on tv or in zoos. Slow internet connections just didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was fine if the internet also wanted to abide by polepole principles.
I did set myself up to be ready to lean into present attention by setting this as my email away message. I hadn’t yet encountered polepole as a word to match, but I do know the importance of setting up boundaries for myself, and this is one way I was able to get myself ready to be fully away.
The email away message is just one way I’ve been trying to embrace the spirit of polepole more fully, especially over the last couple of years. As I’m building up my independent business, my ambitious, driven, organized side (who I used to refer to in therapy as Good Little Soldier and now think of—trying to be kinder and friendlier to her despite the anxiety she brings—as my inner critic, Should-erella) is telling me that I should be doing all kinds of things differently, faster, more successfully. That I should be busier, should be hustling more, should be making more money, should be immediately enacting plans as soon as I’ve thought them up. (You see why I call her Should-erella?)
Should-erella would have me say yes to every offer of work that comes my way, even if it’s not work I want to do or if it’s work that saps my energy reserves. Say yes, to fill up my calendar with work. Say yes, to fill up my bank account with dollars.
And she’s not wrong. I do need both more work and more dollars to make my life once again independent and sustainable (not a status I’ve achieved since resigning from my last full-time gig).
But I’ve been doing my damnedest to bring a polepole spirit into the mix, too. To schedule conversations with colleagues where I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. To play around with ideas and connections that may or may not lead to a concrete result. To dream up new ideas of my own and not assume that the existing norms of the working world are all ones I need to abide by.
Polepole is the part of me that’s reminding me I need to rest and replenish in order to think creatively to find those new working options.
It’s the part of me that was drawn to so many rules about wandering and giving space when I made my recent Manifesto for Adventure, Balance, and Compassion.
Polepole is what’s guiding me to keep up my meditation practice and my yoga and my dancing. To save time on the calendar for Writer’s Hour and to take off on the profound, months-long road trip that was RSR Sees the USA. I remain intensely aware of the privileges that exist in my life that enable a polepole approach, and I know I’m nearing the end of the funds that have been supporting me.
In the spirit of polepole, I’m not picking on myself for the irregular schedule of my writing. I’m taking a few solo retreat days in the last week of the year to write and reflect on the year gone by and the one to come. I’m able to decide how I want to live and work alongside deciding what I want that life and work to entail.
To that end, I have a new offering opening up its doors in January. It’ll be a membership community for folks working independently in the arts and culture sphere (generously and loosely defined) to connect, learn, and support each other. I hope it will be a way to be the change I want to see in the world, to make a space that brings people together in a time when we’re so often feeling split apart and isolated.
It’s a bloom of an idea grown out of living with the polepole spirit in my life, and certainly a place that I plan to be inflected with a polepole spirit of its own. If you want some of that in your independent work, I hope you’ll consider joining me.
I’ll have more to share about it in the new year, including opening sign-ups, so be sure to sign up for my mailing list if you want to know about it first.
In the meantime, here’s wishing you some polepole slowness, reflection, and calm in the remaining days of 2022. Congratulations on making it through another roller coaster of a year, and thank you for spending any little bit of that time connecting your journey with mine or following my adventures.
If you want to see (a LOT) more photos from Tanzania, I’ll be posting more on Instagram, and I’ve uploaded them to Flickr.
Creative Prompt Coda (end of year bonus edition): I love making room for reflection at the end of the year, and I use a number of approaches to frame that. Here’s what I’ll be doing to reflect on 2022 and usher in 2023. Pick one (or more) of these and join me.
Alicia Garza’s new year visioning practice (audio guided explanation)
adrienne maree brown’s spell casting practice (audio guided explanation)
reviewing my year’s worth of Enlightenment Planner entries and journaling for nuggets of wisdom (I highlight all the key passages and then re-write them on a new notebook page)
creating a masterlist of the people I was in contact with this year & the projects I took on, both public and private, paid and unpaid
collecting a summary of major themes of 2022 on the back of my Linnea Design calendar
