As I step into the abyss of the larger globe, I see myself entering another stage of my life... and it is hard not to look back at how I have landed here. From this point, I can see how all this started, and I can also see to the other side... when reality sets in permanently.
It is no doubt the workings of all of you that have allowed me to take this chance... to leap into another time and place, to explore the opposite of home and bask in the discomfort of the other. This has not been an easy transition.... after finding a place of relative inward and outward peace, I have chosen to enter the unknown. It is humanity not-as-I-know-it that needs to be addressed next... it is to them that I go. I hope the awesomeness and otherness that I will find serves not to jumble my identity, but concrete my sense of self webbed into the net of the globe. I just finished a book that in many ways revealed to me some reasons for this quest. This is the defining paragraph:
"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am i particularly exceptional in this matter: each 'I', every one of... us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." - Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.So really, I want to thank you all for making me feel empowered to make this leap, and for my knowledge that the places and people I leave will be here for me no matter what... that I can be me anywhere, still tethered to all that has brought me this far.
Along similar lines our connection to the universe, stated by Albert Einstein in 1954:
ReplyDelete“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty… The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. … We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”