Today I am Seeking {6}

Today I am thinking about connection.

I am thinking about two friends, African-American, who took me [kind of stupidly floundering] and didn't aim to educate me; they simply aimed to love me. They opened their world and they showed me in, and I learned.

(If I wasn't connected to them, ...)

I am thinking about a woman I know, white and of the privileged class, who emailed me to say "thank you for helping me think about these things" and how they were things I have learned, because I listened to my friends.

(If she wasn't connected to me, ...)

I have been Seeking, you know, because that is what I have aimed to do, and I found something, ringing through my head:

When we walked again, few boys spoke. Among the living, many boys were lost that day; they had given up. One such boy was Monynhial... After the bombing, Monynhial's eyes were without light.

--I can't be hunted like this, he told me...

--I'm leaving the group when I find a village, Monynhial said.

--Don't say that, I said.

But soon he did. The next village we passed through, he stopped. Though the village was deserted, and though Dut told him the murahaleen would return to this village, Monynhial stopped walking.

In this village, Monynhial found a deep hole, created by an Antonov's bomb, and he stepped down into it. We said good-bye to him because we were accustomed to boys dying and leaving the group in many ways. Our group walked on while Monynhial stayed in the hole for three days, not moving, enjoying the silence inside the hole...No one visited Monynhial; no animal or person; no one knew he was there. When he became hungry the first day, he crawled out of his hole and through the village, to a hut where he took a bone from the ashes of a fire. Clinging to it were three bites of goat meat, which were black outside but which sated him that day. He drank from puddles and then crawled back to his hole, where he stayed all day and night. On the third day he decided to die in the hole, because it was warm there and there were no sounds inside. And he did die that day because he was ready. None of the boys who walked with me saw Monynhial perish in his hole but we all know this story to be true. 

It is very easy for a boy to die in Sudan.
[D. Eggers, What is the What, p. 160]

Why does this connect with me so? Why do I keep hearing it,
the "It is very easy for a boy to die in Sudan"?

It is very easy for a boy to die in Sudan.

It is very easy for someone to die, when they have given up, when they have lost connection with the very reason to keep on walking, and with the group with whom they walked.

(If he wasn't connected to them, ...)

I read the book, and my heart connects, with the boy in the hole, who dies in Sudan.
I read the book, and my heart connects, with the work of the narrator to hold on to resilience.
I listen to my friends and my heart connects, with the places they have been forced to have been, simply based on the color of their skin.
I listen to the woman who is full of the wrestling, and my heart connects, with her want to understand.

Today I am thinking about connection.