Nafasi: Empty Cups and Developing Countries

Yesterday evening, I was provided with some incredible words of wisdom. Their source was neither a scholarly work nor a facebook status nor a presidential speech. Rather, they came in the form of a boot-legged, karate movie with Swahili subtitles. Though this seemed like yet another attempt at bad entertainment, one scene included a brilliant discourse of empty space.

There’s something valuable about the empty spaces that somehow occupy our lives. As this movie addressed, a cup is not useful because it’s a cup, but because there’s empty space inside the cup. A house is not useful because it has walls, but because it has a livable space inside it. Somehow, my mind switched on at a million miles an hour and I realized that I myself am caught in this empty space.

I currently live in a country of open fields, empty buildings and endless potential. If I stare long enough, it’s discouraging. How could this country accomplish all its desired feats when it lacks the infrastructure and establishments to make it happen? But then I remember that an empty field has so much potential. The children use it to play. Mamas use it to gather and socialize. Pastoralists use it to graze their cows (ng’ombe). The cooperative use of collaborating and preservation of this simple empty field has provided it with so much potential, requiring no significant maintenance from the community around.

When I see the empty ins and outs of these communities, I see potential for growth and life and a future that values the farms, the skies and the simple beauties of life. Often times, we are so caught up in an industrial future that welcomes in development and technology and the filling of these empty spaces. But there’s a beauty in the pregnant pauses of a conversation, the hiccups of the mind just before a brilliant idea, the silence as you appreciate the existence of the present moment.

It’s in these moments of no phones, no structures no to-do list that you find the potential of the day and the potential of your life. If you can empty the day and go for a wandering, you’ve filled your day with endless possibilities. If you can pause and listen without speaking, listen without thinking or doing, your moment of silence guarantees endless heartbeats of emotions and realizations and discoveries of life.

Sometimes you need a room with nothing but walls or a field with nothing but grass or a community with nothing but potential. And it’s in these moments that a city or a country or a human, in its full essence, can have room to breathe and develop. And that my friends, is how a developing country maintains its heart: potential in the empty spaces.