When I flew to Uganda last year, a woman - she eventually disembarked in Burundi, where the plane touched down for an interlude - accidentally brushed up against me as she walked down the aisle. She quickly apologized, and extended her hand in apparent concession. Coming out of a failed nap, I responded in kind, and, in a gesture of mutual reassurance, we pressed each other's hands for a short moment, the pads of our fingers warmly easing into each other's skin, before she walked back to her seat.

In New York, we bump fists and have a repertoire of handshakes, but that kind of reassuring touch doesn’t happen in the subway tunnels. That’s the stuff of sub-Saharan African and the Middle East, and maybe western Europe.

A few months after my flight, I was heading to Brooklyn on a packed rush hour subway. A woman boarded, and, even before the train resumed moving, she tried to reach the metal pole behind me to steady herself. But it was too far away, and all she grasped was air.

I wasn't holding on to anything, either, but I've had years training with this urban balancing act, first as a kid taking tram rides in Warsaw, then as a kid taking subway rides in NYC.

"You can hold my hand, if you need to,” I told her.
“Oh. OK," she said, without much conviction.

As the train accelerated out of the platform, I waited to see if she would take me up on the offer. She braved the physics of it at first. But as we picked up speed, the train began its steady mechanical sway; and, at the first jolt, her instinct for self-preservation overcame her shyness, and she grabbed my hand immediately.

"Thanks," she said meekly.

And I responded by doing the same. I held on to her forearm with equal strength, a shared rescue operation. And so we remained, two strangers holding on to each other and breaking New York City subway decorum, as the train sped under the East River.

“That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion,” says Dogen Zenji. “That the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.”  It’s all in the metaphysical hands of a greater force.  There’s an Yiddish saying: “man plans, God laughs”.  We’re deluded to think we’re in control.

I’ve traveled to Japan, Dogen Zenji’s country of birth, but it was in Uganda that I experienced this in practice.  Nothing here goes to waste except time. It’s not lack of planning exactly, it’s just a different relationship with time altogether.

After filming one morning, I drove to a Mzungu restaurant in town. It wasn’t lunch time yet, and the place was empty, save for a 20 something year old boy behind the counter.

“How long will a dish of fish and chips take?” I asked.
“Fish and chips?”
“Yes.”
“Seventeen minutes,” he replied authoritatively.
“Seventeen minutes,” I paused, surprised at the precision. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“OK. I’ll just run to the bank in the meantime, then,” I responded.
“OK. So we start fish and chips, and you come back.”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, please.”

I jumped back in my car, and drove to a nearby ATM. As I approached, I saw a big sign on the screen: “Sorry, ATM closed.” The teller inside the bank told me it would be open again in 10 minutes.

“I’ll just eat lunch and come back, then,” I told him.
“Yes, please,” he responded.

I flashed him a thumbs up, and returned to the restaurant. Fifteen minutes had passed. The 20 something year old boy was gone, and the woman behind the counter was washing something in the sink.

“I’m back,” I said.
“Hello,” she said.

I looked around, and noticed that the stove wasn’t on.

“Have you started to cook?” I asked.
“I am just cleaning the fish.”
"Oh. He said seventeen minutes,” I paused. “It’s already been fifteen.”
“The fish,” she held up the plastic bag. “There is ice in it.”

Normally, I’d take this in stride, but I had to film in the afternoon. I headed back to my lodge, the one place in town that seemed to serve food at familiar speeds. In that sense, my lodge was an anomaly. The rest of Uganda breathes and lives in different, slower, more organic rhythms. I thought about the boy behind the counter telling me that lunch would take 17 minutes to prepare. It was just a number that sounded good, but it had no logistical reasoning behind it. The food would come when the food would come.

When I headed back to the ATM an hour later, the “Sorry, ATM is closed” sign was gone. But the ATM wasn’t actually working. Neither was the one at the only other bank in town. I had to make do with the few shillings I had left. Like every other day in Uganda, the experience confirmed that planning is useless. More than that, it's not even necessary. Somehow, things fall into place own their own.

the air
In the habitual silence of this wood
Is more than silent . . .
Come!—let me see thee sink into a dream
Of quiet thoughts . . .
--Wordsworth

Murchison Bay was perfectly flat.  Here and there a wooden fishing boat glided over the lake's motionless surface, and the oars--gently, nearly without sound--cut through a heavy mix of gold and blue resting just beneath.  The water parted for a moment, then returned to a silky reflection.

The silence felt infinite, connected to the silence of the entire cosmos. But it wasn't complete silence. There was a soft, delicate web of sound: crickets, birds, monkeys; some near, some far. After enough Ugandan mornings, I'd begun to distinguish them from each other, the way, in NYC, I had learned to distinguish the sounds of cars from the sounds of trucks, or a departing subway from one just arriving. This wasn't actual silence. It was sound without human noise.

The soft cacophony healed every distraught molecule. Mornings like this are spiritual euphoria.