I didn't seek to run away this time, I think I pretty
much have that covered since I’m like 4,000 or something miles from home. I just sought to veer off just a bit and for
just a while. Below is directly from the journal-ing that occurred while
I was there last night:
I'm at this place,
Pois Café. Its heavy curtain with the slit down the middle after the
entry way sparked my curious mind, so I stepped through. Today I was
feeling kind of down, but just in a human condition kind of way. This day
just happened to be lower than the past few days have been. It’s rainy,
and therefore gloomy, and i also think I may be getting sick or just coming to
terms with the fact that I’ve been sick. **I'll skip the part of this entry when I talk about the state of my
tonsils.** So, today I just was
feeling the sigh a bit more than usual. Now though, now as in like this very moment— yea,
it's so wonderful. I'm going to stop thinking about where I should be or
worrying about what could be and be here with all of me, including my mind.
So
often that is not how our moments works. we are here in the most obvious
way and our mind thought about that very place we are in enough to get us there,
but that can be the extent of it. We get our bodies to places, but what
about our minds too? At the beginning of this America's Greatest City book on Chicago I checked out in the
sociology section at my school's library **I
won't explain why, ha.** it questions our true
sense of community in a global and techno-savvy age. No longer (maybe, at
least I think this book is saying...) is our community with the ones our bodies
are "with" or near, but our community is with the ones our minds, and
often only our minds, are "with".
This puts into serious question what we consider community to be I think, it’s
not so straight forward when we add intentions into the equation. We text, call, email, tweet, post, whatever
to everyone away from us. So then they are
our community more so that the ones physically with us? Oofta.
I've
been particularly struggling with metro habits as the metro in itself is foreign to me. Unfortunately, the past week or so I've noticed I’ve begun to take on a
particular demeanor in my own metro travel routine. It goes like this:
Metro, enter, sit, wait, go, hand out, phone on, head down, stop, head
up, hand in pocket, up, move, off repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
BLEH.
Okay,
I don’t go “bleh” at the end of the cycle, thank God, but I do go “bleh” when I think about
the cycle. I mean, come on. I've been craving structure in my days, but
not habituality! I made that word up, but it works, eh? I'm not
sure when the moment was when I mentally shrugged
my hypocrite shoulders and decided to conform to this blindness, but
I definitely made this decision and it is life sucking. Now, people do have to get places and people are tired and people think about what they have to buy at
the grocery story while on the metro. BUT
what if there was just one person on the metro who did have a question, need a bit of
light conversation or even just a reassuring smile and everything
about my demeanor said, "Yep sorry buddy, it's not me. Look past me. I'm alone." This is how I feel so many choose to project themselves
on the metro ride and, recently, how I have chosen to project myself on the metro.
Our
minds remove us from where we are so snidely.
They want our bodies to put on the show that we actually are completely where
our bodies happen to be. In order to truly be where we are
both our bodies and our minds have to be there. What is community if we
are constantly choosing the one that is away? There is some researched definition of community
out there, but here is just my two cents…community is chosen, intentional, and
who we are "whole" to not just with our physical presence, but our
mental presence as well. EVEN on the fast paced metro where I see
hundreds of faces I’ll never see again. I
don’t think the definition of community has a time limit, at least if I were constructing my own, it wouldn't. Presence
takes patience I think, so I hope I can manage that with people I
encounter, even indirectly, and then maybe we could join in silent community for but 2 minutes.
Sometimes
I wonder if I'll ever be able to share and be understood or share in a way that
feels satisfying enough to not care whether or not the other person actually
understands because I do understand just enough to feel even the slightest amount competent
and valid.
I
have a black smudge on my right pinkie from writing like a leftie with the
wrong hand. I finished my beer, this thought, and my ability to suppress
the fact that I've had to pee my entire time being here. Okay, catch me
Lord. I'm asking a lot of You with my stepping without planning and
sometimes without considering that maybe reality really should be a factor sometimes. Just be You, how about, and I'll
be me and then I think that pretty much means all will be well...? Okay,
that is all.
Tan
I'll end this post with this song, because it's been floating in my head for a few days and then
this man in the metro station was playing it on his guitar the other day and it
made me smile.
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