Home :: Postcards and Pearls :: POSSIBILITIES -
Morocco
POSSIBILITIES
If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison
On day 13 of a 14-day trip across Morocco - from the Atlantic Ocean through the cedar forests and the Atlas mountains, past oasis-cradled kasbahs and the velvety dunes of the eastern Sahara - in Marrakech I changed into dirhams the last of the American dollars I brought with me to tip my guide.
Rain drizzled, the sky grayed and I was dragging physically and emotionally, as I tend to do at the close of an active, overseas journey. Also, I planned to walk across the city to a Vietnamese restaurant I read about in a guidebook and, as usual, I was anxious about getting lost. When I approached the moneychanger, my defenses were down.
As I silently slipped the bills through the slot, the moneychanger asked me in French if the equivalent of $40 was all I wanted. Without thinking I said, "Oui. Je retourne aux Etats Unis demain" - I'm returning to the United States tomorrow. I was surprised at how effortlessly the words tumbled from my lips without the usual puttering translation inside my head, a lingering habit from my college language study.
I surprised the moneychanger, too, because he remarked on the high quality of my French. When next he launched into questions about my life back home, the pressure mounted, my self-consciousness returned and I wished he would stop talking and finish our transaction.
But on a day that had begun as a downer, I felt buoyed as I tucked my 400 dirham in my money belt. And for the first time in 20 years, I believed that I could be fluent in another language.
It is our mind, more than our experience, that determines life's possibilities.
|
