What’s Next?

When I first began thinking about Positive Impact 20, it had an obvious end point.

The twentieth anniversary of my HIV diagnosis would arrive. I would travel to Zambia, spend three weeks volunteering, raise some money, come home and, presumably, return to normal life.

That was the plan.

Plans, I am increasingly discovering, are mostly useful for demonstrating how little control we actually have over what happens next.

Positive Impact 20 became considerably bigger than I expected. What began as a slightly vague idea to do something worthwhile with an anniversary I had never particularly wanted turned into months of preparation, £2,810 in donations, three weeks in Zambia and experiences that I am still trying to properly understand.

Then I came home.

For a while, I assumed that would be the ending. There would be some final photographs, a last update, a sincere thank you and perhaps a concluding paragraph in which I attempted to tie everything together with sufficient literary competence to make the whole thing appear planned.

But I don't think I want to do that.

Because very little about the past few months feels finished.

The money has been spent, but what it paid for continues. The Youth Community Centre will be used by people I may never meet. The garden will grow. Children will play on the sports areas. The blood glucose monitors will travel into communities with the medical team. The caretaker will go to work, support his family and look after a building that, when I first saw it, was standing but unfinished and empty.

None of those things requires me to be there.

I rather like that.

There is an understandable temptation with volunteering to measure impact by what you personally did. How many walls you painted, how many sessions you helped with, how many people you met or how many photographs you came home with.

But perhaps the better measure is what carries on without you.

Zambia certainly has.

The people I met have gone on with their lives. The projects continue. New volunteers have arrived and others have gone home. Problems remain, good things happen, somebody is probably wondering why a particular tool has not been put back where it belongs and somewhere in Livingstone an elephant is almost certainly inconveniencing traffic.

Life carries on.

And so does mine.

That last part has taken me a little longer to appreciate.

Twenty years ago, when I was diagnosed with HIV, the future became something I was frightened to look at too closely. I was twenty years old and suddenly being asked to comprehend the possibility of an entire lifetime with something I had barely begun to understand.

For a long time, anniversaries encouraged me to look backwards.

How many years had it been? What had happened since? What had I survived? What had I lost?

Positive Impact 20 began with the same backwards glance. Twenty years seemed significant enough to mark, and I wanted to take an anniversary associated with something difficult and make something useful out of it.

What I hadn't anticipated was that the experience would turn my attention in the opposite direction.

I am forty now.

That sentence would once have sounded impossibly old. These days it sounds suspiciously young.

There are, I hope, decades ahead of me, and Zambia has left me thinking much more seriously about what I want to do with them.

Not in the dramatic, sell-everything-and-move-to-Africa sense. I remain extremely fond of reliable electricity, my own bed and knowing where the good cheese is kept.

Nor have I returned with a belief that every year must now contain an enormous act of purpose. That sounds exhausting, and I suspect it would rather miss the point.

What I do want is to hold on to some of what this experience has taught me.

I want to keep noticing.

I want to be more conscious of where my time goes and whether the things filling it actually matter. I want to remember that useful doesn't have to mean enormous, that giving something can be as simple as money, time, attention or expertise, and that small contributions become considerably less small when enough people make them together.

I want to stay connected to the people and projects I encountered in Zambia, and I would like to volunteer again. Whether that takes me back to Livingstone or somewhere entirely different, I don't yet know.

For once, I am surprisingly comfortable with that.

Positive Impact 20 will continue too.

The name came from one particular anniversary, but somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like the name of a trip. It became a useful reminder of something much simpler.

You can choose what you do with what happens to you.

I would never have chosen HIV. I would happily rewrite parts of the last twenty years if somebody handed me the pen. There have been losses, mistakes and periods of my life that I would not willingly repeat.

But I cannot change any of them.

What I can change is what happens because of them.

Twenty years after a frightened twenty-year-old sat in a clinic and heard three letters that seemed capable of swallowing his entire future, I found myself on the other side of the world painting a community centre, talking about health, laughing with people I had only just met and watching £2,810 given by people at home become something tangible.

That isn't redemption. I don't need redeeming.

It isn't about turning something bad into something good either. Life is rarely obliging enough to balance its books that neatly.

It is simply what happened next.

And perhaps that is what I will take from all of this.

For most of my life, I have been remarkably good at worrying about the future. I have tried to predict it, organise it, hurry it along and occasionally convince myself that I have already ruined it.

Zambia reminded me that the future is also where possibility lives.

There are people I haven't met yet. Places I haven't been. Things I haven't written. Work I haven't done. Causes I don't yet know I care about. There are probably mistakes I haven't made yet too, which is reassuringly consistent.

I don't know whether Positive Impact 20 will lead to another trip, another project, another fundraiser or something I haven't thought of yet.

I don't think I need to.

This began as an attempt to mark twenty years.

It ended up reminding me how much might still be ahead.

So what happens next?