Well to be honest, I can’t really remember what day it was. I’m not good at remembering exact days. Or months, or even years. For an example, I don’t really remember how old I was in my earliest memory. All I remember is that I was in a crib, puking my tiny guts out. My parents? I have no idea where they were. I’m sure they were near and found me quickly enough. But that moment—being sick, alone, and helplessly trapped in my own filth—was branded into my young memory. Sounds pretty traumatizing, doesn’t it? But I think most writers’ first memories are traumatizing. Like Stephen King. His first memory involves dropping a cinderblock on his toe while being stung by a wasp in his ear. Maybe early traumatizing memories help people appreciate the way a single moment’s experience is able to transcend time and space. But anyway, that’s beside the point. I was telling you about the day I realized I wanted to change the world.
It was actually a night at a beach in Dar es Salaam. The vast and mighty Indian Ocean stretched out infinitely in front of me, wooing my mind to reach out with it. I was there with a female friend and we were having one of those rare moments when all the customary pretensions are cast off and you feel comfortable being your naked self. There were no efforts to impress, no artificiality. Just the real me and the real her. We were talking about our “lostness,” as we had so ceremoniously dubbed the condition where you don’t know what the f*** you are doing with your life. She was telling me how she usually managed to bury this anxiety with work. I told her how I used to bury it with what I had fancied to be a “religious calling.”
Now I’m not sure if she asked me directly what it was that I thought I wanted to do with my life, or if I had just finally answered the ocean’s beckoning and tried to grasp an idea so vast, and infinite and so… idiotic. But in that rare and reckless moment, I blurted out, “I wanna change the world.”
As soon as I had said it, I regretted it. With all the propriety I could quickly muster, I clarified myself with, “Actually I wanna be part of a movement that changes the world.” Just like that the magical moment was over. But that was okay, because the second statement was much more realistic. It was also pretty convenient actually. The best thing about it was that if the world never changed by the time I died, I’d be able to console myself with the fact that the movement never started, that someone else somewhere had failed to do his or her part, not me.
But I couldn’t forget the other statement, uttered in that rare and reckless moment. It haunted me like an unruly phantom that refused to accept that its days in the land of the living were over. Suddenly my eyes were open to something I’d probably always known, but pretended I didn’t. But now that I’d said it, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t pretend anymore. I had a stupid and impossible dream: I wanted to change the world.
So I’m working on accepting it. It’s not easy. Everyday, I look in the mirror and tell myself, “I wanna change the world.” But lately I’ve been thinking, am I really the only one who wants to change the world? What if there are actually thousands, millions, or even billions of us scattered around this rock we call home that wanna change the world? What would happen if each one of us knew that—that we all wanted to change the world? And what if we all knew that we all knew that we all knew we all wanna change the world. (It’s okay. Think about that sentence for a minute. Go over it a couple times.) Maybe we could actually change the world. Who knows?
