kuzungukazunguka

Say that ten times fast.  It's my new favorite Swahili word.  This language has an incredible ability to confuse  me constantly and and amaze me at the same time.  Kuzunguka is a verb meaning to walk around.  Nothing quite so special there.  Ninapenda kuzunguka barabara wa Old Town = I like to walk around the streets of Old Town.  But when you start to double up on words in this language meanings start to shift.  Joto, for example, means hot.  Jotojoto can mean really, really hot, or warmish.  (Doesn’t make sense to me either. But it’s all about context.)

When you double zunguka things morph a little bit more.  Kuzungukazunguka doesn’t mean to walk around and around.  Now it means something much more special.  It means to wander with a purpose.  When I first heard that definition, I thought it didn’t make any sense. To wander, to me, seems aimless, mindless.  To feel lost, either in space or in your mind.  How could that be purposeful? 

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, that wandering is kind of what we’re all doing here.  There is no manual for how to live your life.  Some might cite a big old book or two but I’d say the interpretation is a little too wide for that to count.  So we wander.  We navigate this life the best we know how.  We make plans. Sometimes we stick to them, most of the time something inevitably puts us off course, leaving us to find our own way back.  I definitely feel like a wanderer most of the time.  But I like that. Truth is, sometimes, as much as I feel like I don’t know how to get there, I feel that I have a purpose, and am more or less on that path.