But here it is. I was just accused by Clay, my best friend (and everything else), of being "transparent". Well, maybe so, but not to anyone who normally frequents this blog. Very few people, friends at school included, really know me..... and I could now ask the annoying philosophical question, do I really know myself? what is self? And on and on. but I'll stop. those questions drive me crazy.
So, read at your own risk. It was written originally at about two in the morning after a weekend trying to sleep off jet lag. And it's not your normal rosy-colored review of a trip. Just warning.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In class last Friday, I commented on my strange reaction to photographs I had taken of the sites we visited. I looked at the Library of Celsus, at the theatre in Pergamum, at the Parthenon, at Sounion. I marveled at the fact that I was not only the owner of the pictures, but the photographer. I didn’t think it amazing that I had actually stood in those ruins—I still do not entirely feel as though I was there. I said on Friday, “I don’t know where I was, but I wasn’t there.”
Where was I, then? I was internal, removed. The trip was enlightening—I finally saw a glimpse of the person I (perhaps) am becoming. I observed carefully. I wanted to be fully aware of everything I was experiencing, every smell, sight, taste. But while maintaining some sort of hyper-awareness, I lived fully inside myself. This is a rather new development in the story of me. I used to be one to wear my emotions on my sleeve. I used to live life externally. Now I have come into myself, living and feeling fully what it is to see the world through this body. I chose the word “through” intentionally. It is through this body that I am experiencing that world, but my body is not all of me. To feel deeply, I don’t need outside stimuli. To live, I don’t need the world. My body lives in the world; I live in my own world. In my mind. I wish I could describe it, but I am no poet. I see long, flowing strands of color and light. They are far-reaching, absorbent. They touch, feel, taste, and see, and then, every once in a while—and this is what is fascinating, beautiful, and exciting—they retreat to their source. The color and the light comes cascading inward, and are captured, extremely concentrated. It is in the concentration that I feel most alive. I did not feel as though I was in Priene, Miletus, or Athens, because I was not there. The colors and the light touched these things, and the places and people added to the color and light. Now that I’m home, I’m experiencing the delight of the retreat. The colors and light return and remind me of the wonder of the trip, of the people, of the experiences. Through the retreat, I return to the Mediterranean. It is brilliant, this event, and trying to contain it in words is impossible. This description is inadequate, but all others would be as well. Should I try one thousand times to name it, I would fail.
This piece of writing is blatantly stream-of-consciousness, but that is where I am now, both with the trip and with life. The trip culminates a year-long journey to myself. This year has been one of the most difficult of my life. Here now I’ll try to demonstrate the journey through adjectives and phrases, perhaps a short anecdote or two. Perhaps this paper is meant to be merely a reflection on Turkey and Greece, but Turkey and Greece were a microcosm of the transitions of the past year. I reflect on Turkey and Greece—I reflect on an entire year of my life.
April/May 2006
shy, unsure, naive, excited, headstrong, dedicated, determined, self-righteous, getting ready to embark upon a new chapter of life: boyfriend, apartment, first summer of college
June/July/August 2006
trying to settle down, domestic, struggling with myself—wanting to be something I’m not, pushing myself to do things I can’t, trying to convince myself that there is no such thing as “can’t” when deep down I know I’m not born to fly, learning how to be in a relationship, falling in love, bad habits, I know better than everyone else, bits and pieces of resentment towards myself and my inadequacy, ignorance, the fissures in the sacred canopy that had enveloped my life widen, awkward, out of place, trying to maintain who I thought I was but learning that it’s not who I am at all, argumentative, still reeling from Poland and refusing to speak about it—I start to look at pictures from Poland. This is difficult and not understood or appreciated in the way I think it should be. In general, very little is understood or appreciated in the way I think it should be. I expect too much, set unrealistic standards, place my presuppositions on life. Presuppose life and you will always be disappointed.
September/October 2006/November 2006
my self starts to crumble, religion, philosophy, ideas, thoughts start to break me, dependency gets the best of me, I need reassurance, I need a helping hand, I need a shoulder to cry on. The person I want most in the world to be everything to me refuses to be. I have to do it alone. I collapse. I can’t live this way, I can’t be me anymore, I’m so unhappy, so confused, questioning my memories, what did I think was truth anyway? Truth with a capital T eludes me, but now truth, what I had thought was truth, what I thought I could hold and what I thought would keep me safe—it doesn’t exist either. Questions. So many questions that it hurts to think. Soon it hurts to cry, and then I can’t cry. But I’m miserable, and that won’t go away either. It just hurts to live. I retreat, and not to a good place. I retreat from feeling, I retreat from friends, I retreat from who I was, I try to become numb but instead feel too acutely. All I can make myself do is work. I force my mind and my body to go through the motions, and scream at my brain when it thinks it’s too sad to continue. I fight within myself. I must do my reading. I must do my math homework. And dammit, this has to stop hurting. I can’t get anything done with this impenetrable sorrow, misery, and crushing feeling of solitude never subsiding. Am I worthy of happiness?
December 2006
A moment of hope. Maybe things just needed time. Of course I still love you, of course I do. Oh I know. I figured you still loved me. And things “begin” again. Only to fail. Bad habits still exist, broken personalities, confusion and loss of self—these impede anything constructive or beneficial. We just rip each other apart. My already broken self is ground down into dust, then discarded. He is gone. And with him, with us, I am gone as well. The year ends, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I dive into books—I consistently carried six with me from coffee shop to coffee shop, from car to airplane to grandma’s for Christmas. I was reading twelve books simultaneously—just to do it—but only could fit six in my backpack. I’m always reading, because then I don’t have to talk. When I talk, I don’t like what comes out. So I’d just rather not say anything, thank you. When I read, I feel. I don’t know what I feel, but at least it’s something. And it’s other people’s something—not just mine. My feelings are getting annoying. They’re ever present and ever painful, and just obnoxious. So I want to feel other people’s pain. Their pain is different, uncharacteristic, at least. If the pain won’t leave, maybe I can just change the way I feel it. And I so read, and I felt. And it hurt, and muddied the waters even more. Good. The more ambiguous, the more dirty and confusing, the better.
January/February/March/April 2007 (a mixture of thoughts)
A new leaf. New classes, new resolve, new way of feeling numb so I don’t have to acknowledge that I have to see him every other day. After a few weeks at home, I’m able to return and write him off—just kind of edit him from my dictionary. And I feel energized, ready to dive into work, dive back into life. Because there is life out there. I don’t know how I discovered it. My sadness got annoying, and soon other people’s problems—from the books—got annoying too. The human condition got annoying, so I chose to forget its problems and just feel happy. School was a joy because everything was new, but familiar. It struck the perfect balance. Things were fine, and then the shock of the year came out of left field. I agreed to be the accompanist for the musical. Ok, fine, I can deal with the fact that he’s in the musical. But wait—hey..........what did you say? WHAT? ? ? He’s the lead? ? ? So began a painful coming-to-terms-with-him-and-his-new-love-interest-and-with-myself. “He” and his relation to “me” permeates this writing, but this was the major shaper of my year. Through everything I learned, he was always there. So, the musical. He was the lead, she—the new love interest—was in it too. And I had class with both of them. Joy of joys. And I refused to talk badly about her, she hadn’t done anything to me. I told her I was sensitive—“please be sensitive to the fact that this is hard for me.” And she complied, beautifully. I somehow made things work. Academically, beliefs and truths were quickly shifting. God was uncontainable, now unknowable, unnameable, untouchable, wholly other, and finally God only existed within the confines of language and of subjectivity. “Faith” was redefined as simply my intellectual life, my world of thoughts........fitting an unknowable, unnameable entity who didn’t exist empirically back into such a world seemed impossible. And this struggle has remained to the present time. The musical made me grow up, watch him from afar, and recognize that I love him, regardless of what he does, says, how he behaves. The musical helped me to redefine what it means to love. I can’t define it now by rambling off a soliloquy about love, I can only show you. It is to appreciate fully, to adore, to find unique and precious and beautiful, to care without expecting to be cared for, to adore without expecting to be adored, to find the person’s mind complex and unique, to recognize not only the uniqueness of this one individual, but of all individuals, everywhere. To appreciate this individual’s story, and thus to recognize the immensity of all human stories. To see, through this one, how incredible humanity is. How beautiful, diverse, transformative, unique, genuine. And the semester closed, academically/intellectually, with me kind of at a loss. It was the thoughts about humanity and individuals that I learned through my love for him that followed me on this trip.
May 2007
And perhaps it was these thoughts about human beings that kept me removed from the sites, that prohibited me to feel the power of the place. I felt through the trip not the power of place, but the power of people. I wrote the short piece below while waiting for the ship that would take us from Mykonos to Athens:
May 10, 1:25pm
One of the most amazing, fascinating things to watch is the building of relationships. Watching the interaction between two people, or a group, or a community...trying to objectively (ha!) observe the vicissitudes of life, viewing the developing identities of individuals and communities—it’s one of the most intriguing things to watch. Simple yet incredibly complex, surface and external yet infused with subtext and depth—it’s like watching creation.
It is in watching and participating in relationships that I find the most joy. Relationships can cause pain and confusion, loss of self and a sense of purposelessness, but it is also within relationships that one experiences the soaring heights of joy, the luscious breath of love, the elation of laughter. When all else can be questioned and rendered obsolete, relationships — be they honest, open, loving, spiteful, hierarchical, disfunctional, sexual, innocent, hurtful, loyal, dependent, demanding, long-living, parasitic, awkward, long distance, local, time consuming, expensive, fulfilling, one-sided, fragile, passionate, reciprocal, comfortable, unconditional, endearing, a roller-coaster—will always be there, always bearing the weight of the human condition, always telling with blinding truth what it means to be alive. They’ll always be shaping us, even when we try to force them not too. When all else fails, the transformative power of relationships is dependable. Relationships will always be the arbiters of the truth of what it is to be alive.
Poor writing, as most of mine is, but it conveys something of what I was feeling, sitting on a cement wall in Mykonos, watching people mill about. And it conveys what I feel now. I used to disregard relationships and people that I found unnecessary or not beneficial to me. I now find my former attitude disgusting and misguided. Who am I to decide whether a person is necessary or beneficial? Do we not all breathe the same air and are our bodies not of the same basic constitution? Now I feel strongly that every person with whom I come into contact is necessary and beneficial—every relationship, no matter how “deep”, is of the utmost importance to my becoming. And no relationship ever dies, or is really ever born at all, but just comes into being, comes into its time, perhaps. Every relationship transforms me. Every human being I meet changes who I am. And so no relationship dies; relationships just transform. So the fight now is to continue to live in this view, that all human beings are important to me, are beautiful and intricate and transformative. This is especially difficult when I find the person abrasive, or callous, rude, ignorant, etc. But to write them off because this is how I feel towards them, well, that would only be my embodying traits that I find disruptive. I battle with myself, and strive to dignify each individual I meet and each relationship I have—to recognize the individual in each human being.
This is what preoccupied me in Greece and Turkey—the feeling of being overwhelmed by humanity, while also being constantly stripped of that feeling. It also bothered me that we moved so quickly, establishing ourselves for only a few days in one location, and then hopping back on a bus or a boat to move on. I wanted to settle down, I wanted to feel people. I feel as though I missed out on life, because as soon as I began to feel it, it was removed, or rather, I was forcibly removed from it. But this also made it possible to experience the relationships forming between people on our trip, in a different way. The bonds that were formed on the trip, the jokes, the laughter, the layer upon layer of discussion, questions, answers, questions, issues, laughter, confusion, and feeling of loss—these were experiences of relationships, too. And it is the intricacies of the trip and the people and the bonds that are inexplicable to friends at home. I can’t even give a small nugget to my mother for her to understand what happened on the trip, even though she begs, “I want to know everything.” Everything? Ha! How can someone explain two weeks, and millions of memories? Impossible.
I appreciated the trip not because of the food, the sites, the photographs, the smells, the music, the traveling, the cultural and linguistic barriers, nor even the memories, but because human beings brought them to me. Owen asked me while sitting in the lobby of the museum in Athens, “What are you passionate about?” “People,” I answered. “Human beings.” Experiences, solely events, don’t add depth to life. It is the human beings who bring about the experiences that add richness. The depth of the human experience is found in others.
The running commentary on how I now view my development over the past year is incomplete and rushed, to say the least. It is also seemingly out of place for a reflection on Turkey and Greece, as well. This year of my life, all the memories and events, came rushing back to me while we were abroad, though. As I said, to reflect on Turkey and Greece is to reflect on a year of my life. Turkey and Greece provided the right context in which to sit back and sift through myself, or at least to begin sifting. This reflection is incomplete, because I haven’t finished sifting. Who am I kidding? Does one ever finish sifting? These are probably just the preliminary thoughts, preceding more major self-analyzation. Thank God for the trip. Self analyzation is what I needed, and need. And I began it in the company of friends, in a community of trust and like-mindedness, of respect and genuine compassion. Thank you, Dr. Jones, for wisely planting seeds that allowed for such a community. The trip could not have been better.
May 2007
And perhaps it was these thoughts about human beings that kept me removed from the sites, that prohibited me to feel the power of the place. I felt through the trip not the power of place, but the power of people. I wrote the short piece below while waiting for the ship that would take us from Mykonos to Athens:
May 10, 1:25pm
One of the most amazing, fascinating things to watch is the building of relationships. Watching the interaction between two people, or a group, or a community...trying to objectively (ha!) observe the vicissitudes of life, viewing the developing identities of individuals and communities—it’s one of the most intriguing things to watch. Simple yet incredibly complex, surface and external yet infused with subtext and depth—it’s like watching creation.
It is in watching and participating in relationships that I find the most joy. Relationships can cause pain and confusion, loss of self and a sense of purposelessness, but it is also within relationships that one experiences the soaring heights of joy, the luscious breath of love, the elation of laughter. When all else can be questioned and rendered obsolete, relationships — be they honest, open, loving, spiteful, hierarchical, disfunctional, sexual, innocent, hurtful, loyal, dependent, demanding, long-living, parasitic, awkward, long distance, local, time consuming, expensive, fulfilling, one-sided, fragile, passionate, reciprocal, comfortable, unconditional, endearing, a roller-coaster—will always be there, always bearing the weight of the human condition, always telling with blinding truth what it means to be alive. They’ll always be shaping us, even when we try to force them not too. When all else fails, the transformative power of relationships is dependable. Relationships will always be the arbiters of the truth of what it is to be alive.
Poor writing, as most of mine is, but it conveys something of what I was feeling, sitting on a cement wall in Mykonos, watching people mill about. And it conveys what I feel now. I used to disregard relationships and people that I found unnecessary or not beneficial to me. I now find my former attitude disgusting and misguided. Who am I to decide whether a person is necessary or beneficial? Do we not all breathe the same air and are our bodies not of the same basic constitution? Now I feel strongly that every person with whom I come into contact is necessary and beneficial—every relationship, no matter how “deep”, is of the utmost importance to my becoming. And no relationship ever dies, or is really ever born at all, but just comes into being, comes into its time, perhaps. Every relationship transforms me. Every human being I meet changes who I am. And so no relationship dies; relationships just transform. So the fight now is to continue to live in this view, that all human beings are important to me, are beautiful and intricate and transformative. This is especially difficult when I find the person abrasive, or callous, rude, ignorant, etc. But to write them off because this is how I feel towards them, well, that would only be my embodying traits that I find disruptive. I battle with myself, and strive to dignify each individual I meet and each relationship I have—to recognize the individual in each human being.
This is what preoccupied me in Greece and Turkey—the feeling of being overwhelmed by humanity, while also being constantly stripped of that feeling. It also bothered me that we moved so quickly, establishing ourselves for only a few days in one location, and then hopping back on a bus or a boat to move on. I wanted to settle down, I wanted to feel people. I feel as though I missed out on life, because as soon as I began to feel it, it was removed, or rather, I was forcibly removed from it. But this also made it possible to experience the relationships forming between people on our trip, in a different way. The bonds that were formed on the trip, the jokes, the laughter, the layer upon layer of discussion, questions, answers, questions, issues, laughter, confusion, and feeling of loss—these were experiences of relationships, too. And it is the intricacies of the trip and the people and the bonds that are inexplicable to friends at home. I can’t even give a small nugget to my mother for her to understand what happened on the trip, even though she begs, “I want to know everything.” Everything? Ha! How can someone explain two weeks, and millions of memories? Impossible.
I appreciated the trip not because of the food, the sites, the photographs, the smells, the music, the traveling, the cultural and linguistic barriers, nor even the memories, but because human beings brought them to me. Owen asked me while sitting in the lobby of the museum in Athens, “What are you passionate about?” “People,” I answered. “Human beings.” Experiences, solely events, don’t add depth to life. It is the human beings who bring about the experiences that add richness. The depth of the human experience is found in others.
The running commentary on how I now view my development over the past year is incomplete and rushed, to say the least. It is also seemingly out of place for a reflection on Turkey and Greece, as well. This year of my life, all the memories and events, came rushing back to me while we were abroad, though. As I said, to reflect on Turkey and Greece is to reflect on a year of my life. Turkey and Greece provided the right context in which to sit back and sift through myself, or at least to begin sifting. This reflection is incomplete, because I haven’t finished sifting. Who am I kidding? Does one ever finish sifting? These are probably just the preliminary thoughts, preceding more major self-analyzation. Thank God for the trip. Self analyzation is what I needed, and need. And I began it in the company of friends, in a community of trust and like-mindedness, of respect and genuine compassion. Thank you, Dr. Jones, for wisely planting seeds that allowed for such a community. The trip could not have been better.
No comments:
Post a Comment