The Truth is Made of Moments

This post was written by Global Citizen Year alum Thea Holcomb (Senegal ‘17).

“The chicken wants to say something.” The words came tumbling gingerly into existence.

Dé laughed, “Yes, it does want to say something!” My heart lept. I’d done it.

I’d just expressed an observation in the form of a complete sentence. Making observations by way of complete sentences is a skill I’d been practicing for the vast majority of my life, but this was different. Rather than utilizing my native English as means of communication, in the above conversation, I was speaking Serer Laalaa, the language of my Senegalese mother, with whom I was sharing this exchange about a nearby young chicken repetitively practicing his first, shaky attempts at crowing like a proper rooster.

Dé and I sipped our tea as the rooster labored on with his squawking. Our words faded into the breeze.

On the canvas of the time I spent living in a rural community in Senegal, my comment about a bird finding his voice was merely drop of paint. But that minuscule moment was a critical foray into the language that I’d someday become comfortable conversing in- connecting me to a community whose richness and complexity I could never have otherwise known.

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Five months after I reemerged in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah, I spoke into a miniature microphone, “We’ve only found eleven blankets. I think the audience is holding onto the rest of them because they’re cold.” An hour earlier, as over a thousand people streamed out of the auditorium of TEDxSaltLakeCity, my hometown’s independently organized TED event, volunteers had offered them picnic blankets on which to enjoy their lunches.

As a coordinator of volunteers, for me, the absence of all but eleven of our picnic blankets posed a minor crisis, because as happens each year at the conclusion of TEDxSaltLakeCity, we intended to donate hundreds of them to a local nonprofit organization. Ultimately, the crisis was averted. When we communicated our intentions, our audience kindly obliged, and we were able to retrieve all of our blankets.

About five volunteers had distributed the blankets to attendees before lunch, two helped find boxes to fold them back into, the news that they were missing and we’d need to ask to get them back traveled through three people in order for it to reach our audience, six volunteers collected them at the end of the day, and then four more people helped us load boxes of blankets into a truck after the event. Not including any effort before or after the day of the event, that’s 20 individuals who chose to put their precious Saturday-afternoon time and energy into a few hundred fleece blankets. On the canvas of the mammoth collaborative venture that is TEDxSaltLakeCity, how we organized a few hundred fleece blankets is merely a drop of paint.

When people ask, “What do you do for TEDxSaltLakeCity, it’s easy to say, “I run outreach efforts and co-coordinate volunteers.”

Similarly, when people ask, “What did you do in Senegal?” It’s easy to say, “I lived in a rural community, (allegedly) helped teach English in a town nearby, and got involved at the garden run by the Women’s Association in my community.”

Both of these explanations are accurate representations of my experience. Accurate, but inadequate. The truth is ever tenacious in its resistance of simplicity.

We tell our stories in broad, sweeping strokes because broad, sweeping strokes create the kind of imagery that’s most visible in a momentary conversation. The most complete versions of the truth are created not from résumé-ready summaries, but by the millions of moments out of which our lives are made.

The hope is that the attendees of TEDxSaltLakeCity left the event with their minds abuzz over the plethora of ideas shared by our speakers; it seems unlikely that our audience took much time to marvel at the complexity of picnic blanket logistics. But in order for their lunch to have been as lovely as it was, it was vital that dozens of people spent time on details that often go unnoticed.

When we look at the product of human endeavors, it’s all too easy to miss the parts of our stories that go unseen by most, but it is these elusive moments that make the canvases of our lives complete.