What the Elephants Taught Me About Waiting

The year that emptied me out

I had been a doctor for twenty two years before I stopped being able to sleep. It did not happen all at once. It happened the way rust happens, quietly, in places you cannot see until the metal gives way. Three patients died on my watch in one stretch of four months, and though I could recite the clinical reasons for each of them, could stand in front of a review board and explain every decision without flinching, none of that stopped me from lying awake at three in the morning replaying their faces. I am an emergency room physician. I have always told people that the job is triage, that you learn to carry loss the way you carry a badge, clipped on, visible, but not the whole of you. That year it became the whole of me. I stopped tasting food. I snapped at my sister on the phone for no reason and then cried about it in a supply closet. A colleague finally told me, not unkindly, that I looked like a woman who had forgotten how to exhale.

So I booked a flight to Botswana. Alone. My daughter was grown, my marriage had ended amicably three years earlier, and there was nothing tying me to the sofa except habit and fear. I did not tell anyone at the hospital where I was going, only that I would be unreachable. I wanted, for the first time in decades, to be somewhere that nobody needed me to make a decision that mattered.

Landing in the Tuli

The plane from Johannesburg to the Tuli Block was small enough that I could see the pilot's shoulders tense on the dirt runway landing. Eastern Botswana rolled out below us in shades of ochre and rust, mopane trees like scattered green coins, the Limpopo a pale scar in the distance. Nobody met me with a clipboard or a schedule. A man named Kagiso, quiet, unhurried, with hands that looked like they had spent a lifetime reading the ground, loaded my bag into an open vehicle and said almost nothing for the first twenty minutes of the drive. I found the silence unbearable at first. I am used to filling silence with instructions, with vitals, with the sound of my own competence. He offered none of that, and I did not know what to do with myself.

We stopped for nothing in particular. He simply cut the engine near a stand of trees and waited. I asked what we were waiting for. He said, without turning around, only one word. Them. Ten minutes later a herd of elephants came down through the riverbed, unhurried, matriarch first, calves tucked against legs like grey furniture. I had seen elephants in documentaries my whole life and none of it prepared me for the sound, the low rumble under the ribs, a frequency I felt more than heard. I did not check my watch once. I could not remember the last time that had been true.

Learning to sit still

The lodge itself was simple in the way that good things often are, canvas and thatch and a view of nothing but bush for miles. I had expected to fill my days with activity, with structure, because that is how I had survived the last year, hour blocks, checklists, a body kept moving so the mind had no room to spiral. Instead the days here had almost no structure at all. Wake before light. Drive out while the air still had a bite to it. Come back when the heat made the whole world go still and silent, birds included. Sleep, or try to, through the worst hours of the afternoon. Go out again as the light turned gold.

I hated the stillness for the first two days. My hands did not know what to do without a chart to fill in. I found myself pacing the deck of my room at two in the morning, the same three in the morning I had come here to escape, except now there was no hospital hum to distract me, only the enormous quiet of the African night, punctuated by something calling far off that I could not name. On the third night I gave up trying to sleep and sat outside instead, wrapped in a blanket, and watched the stars turn slowly overhead. Nobody told me to go back to bed. Nobody needed me to be anywhere by six.

Kagiso and the things he did not say

Kagiso spoke perhaps forty words a day. I came to treasure every one of them precisely because he never wasted them on filler. When I finally told him, on the fourth morning, parked beside a pan where two bull elephants stood flapping their ears in the heat, that I was a doctor and that I had lost three patients that year and had come here because I did not know what else to do, he did not offer sympathy or advice. He was quiet for a long moment, watching the bulls, and then he said that the old elephants here remember droughts from decades back, remember which trees held water in years nobody else alive would recall, and that the herd survives because someone old enough to have grieved still knows the way to water. Then he started the engine and we drove on. I turned that sentence over in my mind for the rest of the day, and for several days after.

It occurred to me, watching a General wander past our vehicle so close I could have touched the deep folds of skin around his eye, that I had spent twenty two years assuming exhaustion was the price of caring, that if I felt nothing I would become a worse doctor, not a better one. Here, in the Tuli, nothing was rushed and nothing was wasted, and the animals that survived longest were not the fastest but the ones who had learned when to stand still.

What came back to me

On my last full day I mentioned, almost as an aside to the manager over coffee, that a friend back home had been the one to push me into finally booking this whole trip, half joking that I owed my sanity to a stubborn friend and a good Botswana safari, and she laughed and said the bush tends to get credit it never asked for. I did not disagree.

I did not have some cinematic epiphany under a marula tree. What I had instead was smaller and, I think, more durable. I remembered, watching a young elephant shove its mother's leg out of pure irritation, the exact reason I had gone into medicine at twenty three, which was not ambition or prestige but a stubborn, almost childish belief that showing up for people in their worst hour mattered. Somewhere in the ER, in the metrics and the shift patterns and the grief I had never let myself finish feeling, I had lost the thread of that belief without noticing it was gone.

On the drive to the airstrip, Kagiso stopped once more, without explanation, and we sat while a lone bull crossed the track ahead of us, unbothered, enormous, entirely certain of where he was going. I thought about how strange it was that I had needed to fly across the world to a quiet Botswana safari lodge in a place with almost no people in it to remember how to sit with discomfort instead of running from it. I went home two days later. I have not slept perfectly since, not every night, but I sleep. And when I lose a patient now, which still happens, because that is the job, I let myself grieve for an hour before I pick the chart back up. I learned that from an elephant who was old enough to remember where the water was.