Paradise Lost, Purpose Gained

I had become that which I despised the most — mediocre. Just another blip on the continuum of time and space. I would die irrelevant, unremarkable, unremembered, disenchanted with existence but worst of all, filled with regret. Regret for the hours I could’ve spent training and didn’t. Somehow, at the same time though, regret for the hours I did spend training but could’ve been partying or chasing girls. Regret for having turned down multiple ivy league universities to chase a pipedream. At least that’s what it felt like now. My “dream” had been little more than the ridiculous fantasy of a juvenile.

Yes, I pitied myself and felt even more pathetic for doing so. I who had never known depression, anxiety or any sort of fear for the future was now staring into the gaping maw of my worst nightmare: insignificance; and quite frankly, it was terrifying. You’re reading this though, which means I’m still here and that there was a silver lining somewhere. This is my story.

Built Different

I’ve always known that I was exceptional — not necessarily in a good or a bad way but simply that: an exception. We all have our narratives, the subjective phantoms that we grasp at in a bid to justify our existence to the world and most importantly, to ourselves. The notion that I was different just happened to be and still is one of mine. And it has worked to great effect — well, most of the time. I wouldn’t be telling this story if it always worked.

As a child, I was the Admiral of a Roman trireme, a General in battles from the Mongolian Steppes to the Swiss Alps, a Crusader in the Holy Land and an InDuna in Shaka Zulu’s war council. I was a spy for Machiavelli, a peasant during the French Revolution, a Comanche shaman on the Midwestern American plains and a scientist for NASA during the first moon landing. When you are lonely, have hundreds of books at your disposal and dare to imagine, you can be whatever you choose to be. So that’s exactly what I became.

Born the son of a preacher, I was mostly raised in a remote and dirty little town in central Zimbabwe. The boredom was overwhelming and the heat, which was repressive, was only further exacerbated by the dust and mosquitos. The few years that my family had spent in the USA when I was between the ages of about 2 and 6 meant that I had completely lost the ability to speak the local language when we moved back home.

The effect of this (as well as my notably lighter skin compared to the kids at school) was that I was something of an anomaly and stuck out like a sore thumb. The combination of my external features, accent, natural introversion and disagreeableness meant that I had no friends in primary school. At the time I didn’t realise this of course and besides, who needs friends when you’ve got the two most important things in the world: books and sports.

When we had left the US, the Covenant Presbyterian Church of Long Beach, where Dad had been a member of staff, had generously donated thousands of books to us, both for children and adults. Dad was also an avid collector of literature. I could read and write before Grade 1 so by the time I was 7 or 8, I was completely through the children’s collection and by the time I went to high school at the age of 13, I was well versed in many of the classics, as well as histories, biographies and novels. As you can imagine, this set up me for great academic success later in life but I’ll get to that further down.

The Beckoning of Purpose

Sports were the only thing that saved me from being a total geek and I played them all at first — cricket, hockey, swimming…well, that was until the day I discovered rugby. After that day nothing else mattered. I still remember exactly how it happened.

We were at a fun day at my younger brother’s pre-school and some kids were kicking around an oddly shaped ball. It kind of looked like a giant egg to me and more interesting to me than even the ball itself was the fact that the kids who were playing (they were about my age or slightly younger) seemed to be tackling each other.

The sensation that followed as I stood there watching this was a chilling cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins. Massive waves of excitement coursed through my system. The tackling was such a novel sight to me that I maxed out on whatever testosterone a 9-year-old boy can possibly have. It seemed so…primal, so exhilarating, so aggressive and it called to me. For context, I’ve always been big (and tall) for my age and whilst I enjoyed the other sports, cricket and hockey required a level of finesse and skill that I never quite possessed and cross country was great for my overall fitness but quite frankly, as I did back then, I hate running. I knew in that moment that whatever this was — this game that was happening in front of me — I could be brilliant at.

I wanted to play but there was just one problem: these kids were white. White people were something of a rarity in my little town and because we hardly had any at school (and I was just weird), I never quite knew how to interact with them until I went to boarding school, which was a much more racially diverse environment. Also, these white kids were not amongst any of the few I knew from the area — they must have been from one of the whiter schools in the neighbouring towns. I didn’t care though, I had to play.

So, gathering all the courage and social grace I could muster, I went up to them and asked to play. They said no. And not even in the nice way, for example where you ask to join a pick-up game of basketball or something and they tell you they’ve already got even numbers on both teams. This was just a flat out, very rude, “Who are you and why do you think you can play with us?” kind of no. I didn’t care though, I was hooked.

It wasn’t apparent to me at the time but that moment set off a spark in me that I’ve never been able to put out since. As fate would have it, my primary school would go on to introduce rugby in my final year there so I picked it up at the age of 12 and was absolutely obsessed. The year after that I was selected for the national u13 team and by the time I was 18, I was the captain of the national u18 side — the dream of any schoolboy rugby player. Whilst all this was happening, in the background, I was an excellent academic and when I applied to some of the top universities in the world in my final year of high school, I got into almost all of them.

I, therefore, had a small dilemma as my high-school career was ending — the proverbial fork in the road if you will. I had been scouted by one of the top rugby clubs in South Africa (and the world) and they offered me a contract to play for them. South Africa is the much bigger and wealthier southern neighbour of my home country, Zimbabwe and a move there would mean I could chase a career as a professional rugby player. South Africa is a nation with a proud rugby tradition, having won 3 World Cups in the past (most recently in 2019) and is the only country in Africa where one can make a career of rugby. For context, this was rugby’s equivalent of being drafted in the NFL draft — it was huge, especially for someone from my country.

If I was to choose this path though, I would have to give up the opportunity to study law at one of the top universities either in Europe or the USA. I could, of course still study the law, albeit from the much less glamorous (in my mind at the time) and well-renowned University of Johannesburg, who were very happy to provide full scholarships for both tuition and board for pro-athletes. Naturally, I was torn. Choose rugby, and essentially give up my chance at a world-class education or choose a top-ranking university and give up my dream of being a professional rugby player.

I agonized over the decision for months. My family have always been very supportive but it didn’t help that they had differing views and opinions on the issue.

A Dream Come True

I’ve always had as my singular driving force, the notion that I must return home one day with something to show for all the opportunity I’ve had — with something to give back to the children of Zimbabwe, with a story that reminds each and every one of them that kids from dusty little towns can make it out too and be something. I dreamed of a day when I would be able to make a real difference in a community that was riddled with poverty and hopelessness. I grew up seeing it and it broke my heart. Rugby was not only a personal dream of mine but it also presented the opportunity for money and influence much quicker than the conventional school route and when it comes down to it, it's not politics or protests or endless human rights pronouncements that make the difference — its money and influence.

So eventually I signed the contract and was off to Johannesburg in February of 2015, which actually made me late for school since I had taken so long to decide but it was neither here nor there for me because, to be frank, I wasn’t going there for school anyway.

I can only describe the four years that followed as a blur. The training was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life but so was the culture, the racism, the xenophobia and the rugby itself. Rugby in South Africa is still a very white-dominated environment and the powers that be do their best to keep it that way. Couple that with the tendency of South Africans to dislike foreigners (especially from other African countries) and I was truly in the deep end. Most of the time though, I was able to ignore a lot of the noise and train, just grind it out day in and day out. And it worked. I rose through the academy ranks and by the time I was 22 I made my senior professional debut, against the odds. I felt like I had finally made it and the years of hard work, dedication and putting up with BS had been worth it — but then it happened.

All Too Human

In early 2019 I had an accident in training which ended my career in a single second. We were running a defensive drill which by that time I’d probably done a thousand times over in my life — that’s probably why I wasn’t paying attention and someone’s shoulder ended up colliding with my face. One explosive, violent and determining second is all it took. I remember opening my eyes to the most beautiful baby blue sky I’ve ever seen. A few seconds late the taste of iron flooded my mouth and I realised where I was. I slowly wobbled onto my feet. My legs gave out and as I hit the ground again the blood came gargling from my mouth and nose and the sky above me turned from blue to different hues of blackish-blue and grey. Then there was the noise, everything sounded so loud, so amplified. The voices of people gathering around me to help sound like the blaring of sirens. I can’t recall much after that.

I remember sitting in the doctor’s office the next day, looking at a scan of all the fractures in my face and the loosened teeth. He didn’t have to say it — I knew this was the end for me. I have a long history of concussions and this one was the nail in the coffin. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not prone to emotional extremities. I exist in a general state of contentment. I can count on one hand the number of times in my life that I’ve felt true elation — the type that illuminates your soul with the force and brilliance of light entering a dark room.

Until that point, I had never known true sadness either but that night as a lay in bed it bore down on me like a spectre. I felt it in the pit of my stomach, slow but persistent at first. It expanded until it filled my inward parts, swirling around with more and more velocity until there was nowhere for it to go and that’s when I felt the dream explode on the inside of me like a supernova. The particles of what had been my entire reason for existence rushed up out of my belly and through my mouth in a single savage howl and as the sound dissipated into the dark, so did a universe that had once lived some harmoniously inside me and in its place was a black hole. I cried myself to sleep that night, which I put down to the cocktail of painkillers I was on because, you know, “real men don’t cry.”. When I woke up the next morning, I felt nothing.

Recalibration

Since I was a teenager I put off reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost — it has 10 000 lines of verse written in archaic English and even though I’m a lover of the classics, I couldn’t justify taking the time out to read it. Well, now that I was sitting at home and recovering for the foreseeable future, I had all the time in the world and since I couldn’t be bothered to do anything else, I took on the challenge. I read there in the second book that “Long is the way, And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.” Hell is not just the apocryphal realm of punishment for the wicked. Hell exists within all of us. In all of us is the potential to reach depths of suffering or indifference that threaten the very essence of who we are. I had created my own hell and I was living it day by day, which was obvious from my depression, from my crumbling familial relations, from my rapid weight gain. I stopped caring and it was killing me. What was even more concerning was, it was comfortable. Not caring is easy, especially when you feel justified in not doing so because the world supposedly owes you something.

I had to climb out. So I did. It’s taken me more than two years but every positive step I take is a step further away from apathy — a step further away from hell. At some point I realised my problems were infinitesimal in the grand scheme of things and that by comparison to many, I was incredibly blessed. I had people who loved around me during that time, access to health care in my time of need, clean water, a roof over my head and clothes on my back. Tiny miracles that repeated themselves day after day. So I made a habit of reciting all the little miracles that constitute my existence and daily come together to form the messy but brilliant mosaic of my life and I realized that quite frankly, maybe it wasn’t so bad.

I celebrated my graduation from university a few months later and started looking around for the next step in the journey. Many no’s and disappointments later, I landed the job I have now with a top commercial law firm in London and honestly, it’s hard to imagine that I ever wanted to do anything else. You see, it’s not that I don’t still mourn for what could’ve been, it's more at some point I detached my identity from that specific dream. My purpose has not changed. I have always sensed that I am blessed for a reason. I have gifts, talents, work ethic but more importantly, I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to exploit that.

I no longer attach importance to achievement for the sake of fame or fortune. My hope was and still is to be able to give other people the opportunities that I got in life, the marginalised from my country, the forgotten. This is and will always be who I am, regardless of what career I’m in. My true dream, the one that was blurred behind visions of stadia filled with people calling my name and me hoisting the world cup trophy above my head, is one of a continent united. My true purpose is to see my family, my town, my nation and my continent, rise from obscurity and take their place on the world stage. Lord knows we deserve it. Lord knows we have just as much talent, intellect and skill as anyone else. We just need a chance and to the extent that my work takes me around the world and opens doors with incredible people, I want to give as many people with a background like mine that chance.

So that’s the story of how the death of my dream has led to the birth of a different person with a different understanding of purpose. I was born to work, not only for myself but that the world around me might be better for someone else tomorrow than it was today. That is my grind. That is my hustle. That is the purpose that keeps my hand to the plough.