Mad World: A Dispatch from the Edge of Reality

September 29th, 2008

In my hand is this whis­tle with a wheel at the end that spins when you blow air through it — and I am absolutely amazed. It’s not the whis­tle. It’s how it was made. A friend of mine just loaded a file on a com­puter, pressed PRINT, and forty-five min­utes later, there it was.

The rest of the day, I imag­ine how much this tech­nol­ogy will improve and how much it will shake up the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try when we can sim­ply print off the goods we need from designs that can be spread at the speed of thought. We are liv­ing right now with the power to do things that were not so long ago the domain of sci­ence fic­tion — and it’s an amaz­ing time to be alive.

After hav­ing exhausted all the great pos­si­bil­i­ties of the con­ver­gence of 3D print­ing, nan­otech­nol­ogy, and indus­try, I come back to my senses and real­ize we’ll most likely use it to build bet­ter bombs.

Because, make no mis­take, they are out to get us. And the only way to really make sure that doesn’t hap­pen is to get them first. For as it has been known in every sketched out moment of West­ern life: When you can’t trust any­one, you need to be able to con­trol it all — and to do that for any rea­son­able length of time, you’ve got to have good bombs.

The fris­bee seems to almost stand still as I jump. I pluck it out of the air, spin around, and throw it back. The next throw is a long one, and I’m so focused on it that I almost back into a group of baby boomers who all give me dirty looks.

At some point it occurs to me that the piece of plas­tic we’re throw­ing back and forth is really just an excuse for grown men and women to dance in a field — because once you get the basics of catch­ing it down, the real plea­sure is in the flow of your move­ment, in how grace­fully you can grab onto it and then let go.

Some­how the need for a pur­pose to dance around like a fool (if that is what one feels like doing at any par­tic­u­lar moment) seems silly. Then again, there are many harm­less things which we nev­er­the­less learn are wrong, and the more we learn of these things, the closer we come to being all grown up.

But in this moment, I’m back to look­ing at the world through the eyes of a child, where every­thing is an adven­ture and your only duty is to make sure you and your friends are hav­ing fun. I won­der if we all should have per­haps taken the art of play more seri­ously. After all, when we’re not busy play­ing, we tend to be busy wor­ry­ing about our sal­va­tion and wag­ing wars.

We’ve been taught to stop believ­ing in the Bogey­man, but that doesn’t keep him from exist­ing. He’s that rogue nation, that sleeper agent, that quiet guy sit­ting next to you on the bus, mind boil­ing, wait­ing for a chance to strike. When we were younger, we could stay safe by mak­ing sure to check under our beds and by keep­ing a close watch on our clos­ets. Now, we real­ize that the price of that feel­ing of safety has become our eter­nal, neu­rotic vigilance.

Freedom™ and the 2008 Trifecta of Absurdity

September 28th, 2008

I’ve been hear­ing reports about Free­dom™, a new fran­chise that’s tak­ing the world by storm. It was founded shortly after the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and has sev­eral patents pend­ing. Don’t even try to fuck with these peo­ple. They have never been ones to back away from a fight.

Born again fighter pilot and pres­i­dent George W. Bush was leg­endary in his bat­tles with the Ene­mies of Free­dom™ in the early dark days of the new mil­len­nium. It was a long, hard road, lit­tered with bil­lions of oil soaked dol­lars and a seem­ingly bot­tom­less down­ward spi­ral of esteem from the greater world com­mu­nity, but it was what Amer­ica needed to ensure its secu­rity from lunatics wav­ing box cutters.

How­ever, George Bush, even after all of his great achieve­ments, only laid the ground­work for pos­si­bly the great­est hero of our time…

You could barely tell dur­ing the Sep­tem­ber 26, 2008 debates, but hid­den under John McCain’s well starched suit was a jet pack with enough fuel to fly him per­son­ally back to Wash­ing­ton D.C., just in case the Econ­omy starts to sud­denly crum­ble and he needs to hold the entire thing on those fierce, war hard­ened, seventy-something shoulders.

John’s the real deal. A fighter and a mav­er­ick. An hon­est to God Amer­i­can hero. And you can bet all your hard earned money that he’ll mus­cle his way through those Wash­ing­ton fat cats and fix this rogue econ­omy once and for all.

No one could have ever pre­dicted the prob­lems on Wall Street before Pres­i­dent Bush announced them — but only John McCain had the light­ning fast reflexes to halt his cam­paign in its tracks and save the day. And rest assured, he will win the war with the econ­omy — or die trying!

Speak­ing of death, there are some who are silly enough to worry over John’s health… What these peo­ple fail to rec­og­nize is that God has per­son­ally (per­son­ally!) picked an even bet­ter fighter, a more mav­er­icky mav­er­ick… a woman who has stared into the evil eyes of Vlad Putin all the way across the Bering Strait and lit­er­ally froze the Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter in his place. If there’s any­one left won­der­ing why the KGB hasn’t been knock­ing at his door over the last eigh­teen months, he has only to look to hockey mom Sarah Palin.

Make no mis­take, this is a ticket backed by Jesus Him­self. And there are still too many good old boys out there who know bet­ter than to put their trust in a black man.

Let’s just take a look at the real issues for a moment: Most of the world — com­prised of god­less idiots spout­ing non­sense about evo­lu­tion and plan­ets rotat­ing around the sun — is under the mis­taken impres­sion that it’s more than a few thou­sand years old. Some of them smoke pot. Some of them are gay. Some of them try to com­pete with Free­dom™, offer­ing up their own dan­ger­ous ver­sions which don’t include such neces­si­ties as war­rant­less wire taps, off­shore con­cen­tra­tion camps, and ter­ror­ist watch lists com­plete enough to include every­one five years old and up. They are a bunch of sissies who have the com­pletely unpa­tri­otic audac­ity to ques­tion authority.

And they all believe in killing babies. That’s right. Killing babies — long before they can be sent into places like Iraq or Afghanistan to get their arms and legs blown off in the name of their coun­try. It’s as if these peo­ple don’t know that the only choice a woman should ever have is whether or not her son or daugh­ter will die for Freedom™.

Only the most stub­born, immoral freaks could in good con­science vote for a man like Obama, a man who acts like these impor­tant issues don’t even exist.

Remem­ber, boys and girls, the ancient wis­dom of The Book of Rev­e­la­tion — he will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time. One must be eter­nally and neu­rot­i­cally vigilant.

What’s with all these dis­trac­tions, like the mid­dle class and health care and edu­ca­tion? Energy inde­pen­dence? If God was able to guide his prophet Sarah Palin in build­ing the Alaskan pipeline, don’t you think He can guide her in solv­ing America’s energy prob­lems? That is, if He even needs to solve the energy prob­lems. Don’t for­get that the Sec­ond Com­ing is long overdue.

Yes, my friends, these are excit­ing times! And if you’re a fel­low Cana­dian, you not only have the priv­i­lege of watch­ing how things are done in a real coun­try — you get to play along too. The hope is that we’ll be so blinded by the polit­i­cal wrestling match to our south that we won’t even notice Slick Steve Harper weasel his way into another minor­ity gov­ern­ment. Once firmly in place again, he and his party will be able to redou­ble their efforts to stick us with ridicu­lous copy­right leg­is­la­tion, chip away at our con­sti­tu­tion, and sell off our nat­ural resources to coun­tries that can man­age them bet­ter. But really, if you can for­get about the party that intro­duced it for just a moment, you have to admit that Slick Steve did a great job slash­ing the GST.

Sure he might just seem like a slightly smarter ver­sion of G-dubya, taken down to a CBC-approved level of pro­duc­tion qual­ity, but if we’re gonna get to hang with the big kids, we need some­one will­ing to kiss each and every ass, and we need a party that can show its true inner pimp and sell us out to whoever’s buy­ing. And for that sacred job, there’s no one bet­ter than Slick Steve and his merry Alliance of Conservatives.

God will­ing, Harper, Palin, and McCain (though he may not live to see the promised land) will lead us all into yet another decade full of fear and trembling.

Zen, or Something Like It

May 6th, 2007

At the bot­tom of every­thing we do, there will always be this fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: Is it worth the effort?

Is it worth the effort to try and improve one­self, to learn some skill or gain some mea­sure of wis­dom? Is it worth the effort to get to know this per­son? Is it worth the effort to stick around — or to leave? Is it worth the effort to be strong and hope­ful when life can just seem so damn cruel some­times? And should I even get out of bed this morn­ing? After all, what’s it all for, anyway?

The haunt­ing real­ity is that we’re never really sure. We can ignore the ques­tion. We can give a group, nation state, or spir­i­tual leader the author­ity to answer the ques­tion for us. We can even con­front it directly, turn­ing our­selves into meta­phys­i­cal Don Quixotes, los­ing our­selves in a mad and roman­tic fan­tasy that one day we will grab hold of the secret, that once and for all, we will be certain!

But the mon­ster will always lurk some­where in the cor­ner of our minds, wait­ing for signs of weak­ness, wait­ing for us to ask the ques­tion again, this time with­out the pro­tec­tion of an answer. It’s a fran­chise hor­ror movie vil­lain like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. We can fight it off for a while, but it will never truly die. There will always be the pos­si­bil­ity of a sequel.

The next time some­one asks you whether or not you’re a spir­i­tual per­son, check your pulse. Is your heart still beat­ing? You just might find the truest, most gen­uine faith in that space between one beat and the next.

And if so, what sense is there in ask­ing whether you need to be more spir­i­tual or less spir­i­tual or whether you’ve cho­sen the right fla­vor of spir­i­tu­al­ity? Wouldn’t most gen­uinely spir­i­tual peo­ple agree that, so long as it keeps the mon­ster at bay, it is good enough?

If I could make one hum­ble sug­ges­tion, how­ever, it would be to mea­sure any sort of spir­i­tual growth by your capac­ity to feel joy rather than your capac­ity to endure pain.

It’s not that one way is any more cor­rect than the other. It’s just that there are more than enough gloomy lit­tle peo­ple run­ning around, pro­claim­ing that evil is abound, the end is near, and that you need to sac­ri­fice and purify your­self for what comes next. It’s great if such cyn­i­cism works for them, but you must always keep in mind that they really don’t know any bet­ter than you what it’s all about — no mat­ter what their cre­den­tials are or who they pre­tend to speak for. So why not fol­low a path that makes you happy?

Per­haps what­ever it is that cre­ated you requires noth­ing more from you than your will­ing­ness to just do your thing for as long as you can.

For those of us who seek the Truth, God, or Enlight­en­ment, do we seek these for their own sake, or do we seek them because seek­ing is just our thing? After all, the Truth is right in front of us, God is present in us and all around us, and what exactly is hold­ing us back from Enlightenment?

Maybe there is noth­ing to seek. If it makes life seem more worth­while, then seek­ing is, of course, a very impor­tant activ­ity — but the per­son who does not seek is no less spir­i­tual, no less aware of what’s actu­ally going on. Because none of us really knows what’s actu­ally going on. It’s all guesswork.

Could the prover­bial seeker learn a thing or two from the prover­bial couch potato? Sure, he may lack ambi­tion and finesse, but he’s fully absorbed in what he’s doing, and he makes no apolo­gies for it. There’s some­thing sort of heroic and noble about that. He’s fight­ing the mon­ster like every­one else, and he’s not even break­ing a sweat.

This whole thing we’re doing seems fun­da­men­tally odd. Why have any of it? For­get about try­ing to find the mean­ing of life. Rather, ask your­self: what pos­si­ble mean­ing could it have, in and of itself? And behind this ques­tion, you’ll find the mon­ster bar­ing its sharp, white teeth.

I walk along some ran­dom street and hear the splish-splash of rain drown­ing out every other sound. Hun­dreds of strange faces hus­tle about with the most sin­cere impor­tance, each hid­ing an entire uni­verse of mem­ory and long­ing. The street we’re stand­ing on turns upon this gigan­tic sphere orbit­ing around a huge ball of fire that orbits, along with other huge balls of fire, around some incred­i­bly mas­sive cen­ter. That cen­ter is one of many such cen­ters, all of them sus­pended in an incom­pre­hen­si­bly vast pool of noth­ing­ness. In this moment, I know all I need to know about the mean­ing of life. This is it. This, right here, is the answer. I know also that as soon as I try to put it into words, to use it to explain my past or to con­vince myself of any par­tic­u­lar future, that it will dis­ap­pear as quickly and mys­te­ri­ously as it came.

There is a spec­tac­u­lar dance going on here, and I am reminded that no one who really enjoys danc­ing does it for any par­tic­u­lar purpose.

As I look deep into the monster’s eyes, I dis­cover the soul of the sav­ior, for they are one in the same — yin and yang. I see that life springs from poetry as much as poetry springs from life, that there is a cer­tain seduc­tive cadence to it all. I breath in and I feel the begin­ning. I breath out and I feel the end. I see the end become the begin­ning even as the begin­ning becomes the end, and I know!

I know that it’s all mov­ing along as it should. There’s no urgent need for me to fix it, to tam­per with it, to some­how make it bet­ter than it is right now. So far, it has done an alright job on its own. It flows nat­u­rally from one per­fect moment to the next for any­one who cares to notice.

And now, if I sit very still and pay atten­tion to what’s going on around me, I might start to won­der where exactly it is that “I” begin and end. Am I my thoughts? Am I my body? Am I my future or past? Am I the per­son I think I am, or who oth­ers think I am? Am I all of these things? Or am I none of them?

If I dig down really deep to that core essence that has some­how stayed with me, unchanged, through twenty seven years of con­stant change, what will I find? How can it be so famil­iar and yet so elusive?

In silence, beyond words and thought, I touch this essence for the briefest moment, and I am at peace. My eyes open and I look upon the world with a new sense of wonder.

In every face, every tree, every stone, every brush of wind, in the sun­light and in the dark­ness, there is that same essence, unchang­ing and eter­nal, which is found in the depths of my own Self. It is in the rise and fall, in the cre­ation and destruc­tion. It is all things. And it is none of them.

Every now and then, I’m asked what I think heaven will be like, and I always find it to be a very dif­fi­cult ques­tion to answer. To be hon­est, I don’t worry too much about whether there is one or, if there is, whether I’ve been good enough to go there when I die. What I fear is that I won’t know I’m in heaven, that I could walk right through par­adise with­out even tak­ing a sec­ond glance at it. What a shame that would be.

And there’s a nag­ging sus­pi­cion that this is exactly what I’ve been doing for all this time.

So I some­times imag­ine that on some very ordi­nary day, I’ll be walk­ing along and be struck sud­denly by a strange feel­ing. There I’ll be, stand­ing in some famil­iar place, real­iz­ing that I had never rec­og­nized it for what it really was until now. And I will know that I am there.

When that moment arrives, I plan to have a good, long laugh at my igno­rance — and then, at last, to become for­ever lost in the dance.

The Absurd Generation

March 14th, 2007

I was born in the wrong decade. It’s been a per­sonal joke for as long as I can remem­ber. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a ninja, which would have only been a viable career choice in feu­dal Japan. As a teenager with long, unruly hair, ripped jeans, and peace­ful spirit, I was a throw­back to the six­ties. In fact, have I ever left the six­ties? The hair’s shorter and the clothes are more cur­rent — but what of the fas­ci­na­tion with zen, the exper­i­men­ta­tion, the lib­er­tar­ian lean­ings, say­ing “man” all the time, and the dis­dain for The Establishment?

Among other things, my gen­er­a­tion has been called the MTV Gen­er­a­tion — what­ever that’s sup­posed to mean. Being of the MTV Gen­er­a­tion, I’m not a fan of the label. In fact, my gen­er­a­tion doesn’t like being put in a box — unless you define your own box, that is. And right there is some­thing that’s actu­ally sort of inter­est­ing about us.

How does it feel to be in your twen­ties in the new mil­len­nium? Well, sort of like you were born in the wrong decade. You see, I don’t think I’m alone in my alien­ation. Alien­ation is a key aspect of being young right now.

We are a gen­er­a­tion of bor­row­ers. The rave scene’s just an elec­tronic rehash of the six­ties. The drugs aren’t even all that new — at least, not the good ones. The goths? Well, you’ll find the most char­ac­ter­is­tic roots some­where back in Vic­to­rian era lit­er­a­ture. How about emo? One part fifties inno­cence and cloth­ing, two parts nineties self-loathing, and a pinch of six­ties psy­chol­ogy. It may look new, ladies and gen­tle­men, but you can bet your bot­tom dol­lar it’s a remix of times gone by.

Do we have any­thing of our own? Even the feel­ing that we will live to see the end of the world is just a Hol­ly­wood remake of Cold War fear. We don’t even have that. And we know it. And the fact that we know we can never really do any­thing orig­i­nal really sucks. Some­times I just want to for­get about it, go to the mall, and play video games. And right there is some­thing that’s actu­ally sort of inter­est­ing about us.

To all my fel­low shame­less bor­row­ers, I’d like to sug­gest some­thing that we can call our own: We are the first gen­er­a­tion to be truly aware of its own absur­dity.

In fact, I’m so aware of my own absur­dity that I’m almost afraid to be writ­ing this. After all, it had to have already been claimed by some other gen­er­a­tion or some other author. This can’t be a new dis­cov­ery. And even if it was, would it not just be a shame­less attempt to be a “voice of my gen­er­a­tion”, which, after all, has been done before ad nauseam?

You see, even as I form these thoughts, I’m crit­i­ciz­ing them. How ridicu­lous! This is, like, so post-modern it’s not even funny.

Hey, old timers! You won­der why we’re so scat­ter­brained some­times? You try ana­lyz­ing every­thing you do and see how well you can concentrate.

My gen­er­a­tion won’t need the next to open up our year­books and snicker at how fool­ish we all were. We already know. We know that every style and every trend will fade. In every new thing, we see its demise and its sub­se­quent resurrection.

Fuck. I think I’m get­ting a headache.

Look at that. Drop­ping the “F” bomb to show a bit of edge. I know I won’t get away with it, so I thought I’d point it out, you know, to make sure you know that I know.

The more I look at it (and, to be hon­est, the more I look at all of this), the more it all both­ers me. It’s like I’m sim­ply par­o­dy­ing some­one who’s already been down this road and under­stood it bet­ter. Because, instead of Jiminy Cricket sit­ting on my shoul­der as a child, I had Siskel and Ebert. And they taught me to dig deep.

So why did I even start writ­ing this, then? What pos­sessed me to do it? Who did I think I was fool­ing? What was I thinking!?!

I guess all I can really say in my defense is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

On Groceries and Fire Bombing

February 26th, 2006

“The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at what­ever speed she wants by just turn­ing one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen win­dows goes through rapid changes of light to show morn­ing, noon, and night — throb off and on furi­ously with day and dark, and every­body is dri­ven like mad to keep up with that pass­ing of fake time…“
~ Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)

Mean­while, Patrick and I are being dri­ven mad try­ing to find an open gro­cery store to get some good break­fast and lunch food (while spend­ing 10–15 euro on din­ner is not incred­i­bly trau­matic, spend­ing the same on break­fast and lunch seems a bit extrav­a­gant). One is tempted to share the schizoid para­noia of Kesey’s nar­ra­tor… per­haps the Ger­mans know our plans and have hired a huge group of peo­ple to move the build­ings, piece by piece, before we arrive. Or maybe they’re turn­ing out the lights just as we’re about to round the cor­ner, all cur­rent cus­tomers hid­ing behind the shelves. Just another closed store, boys! Move on through! Danke shen!

This is new to me. And it reminds me that with every new expe­ri­ence, there’s another old assump­tion that gets bro­ken. Here in Dres­den, you are hard pressed to find any neces­sity shop­ping (or any sort of shop­ping that’s not totally tourist-based) on a Sun­day. Most places are closed. And even if they’re open, they’re hard to spot. The tell­tale look of a Safe­way or an Extra Foods or a Sainsbury’s (for the Brits among us)? Oh no. Noth­ing so sim­ple. “Look for any­thing that says ‘Markt’,” Patrick says. And more likely than not, it’s going to be at the bot­tom of some apart­ment build­ing with noth­ing but a small sign to announce its presence.

We never found the gro­ceries, but I did man­age to get a more com­pre­hen­sive look at Dres­den. Bombed out cathe­drals, forested areas in the mid­dle of the city (appar­ently, it’s one of the green­est cities in Europe), cas­tles, and col­or­ful, some­times aban­doned, man­sions were the scenery for our gro­cery hunt. I think the absence of cheap food for a day was a worth­while trade for tak­ing a scenic route to nowhere in particular.

That night I got a guided tour of the old town area, and all those big old build­ings, inter­est­ing enough just to look at them, took on the dimen­sion of his­tory. At one point, we arrived at a church with some black bricks mixed among the whitish ones. “Dur­ing the war,” Patrick explained, “About two thou­sand peo­ple hid in this church. It never got hit. They con­sid­ered it a mir­a­cle. Then about two days after the bomb­ing run, after all the peo­ple had exited the church, the pure heat gen­er­ated from the bomb­ing in the area caused the build­ing to basi­cally explode. Look, there’s a chunk of it there.” And I saw a large piece of stone that had obvi­ously been left in its exploded posi­tion as a reminder of what hap­pened here.

There are a lot of peo­ple who say the bomb­ing of Dres­den was itself a war crime. No mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, no real value in defeat­ing the Nazis. Of course, the hawks will argue that there were offices, etc. here that were of strate­gic impor­tance and that, dur­ing the war, the lives of a thou­sand Ger­mans were not worth as much as the life of one of the Allied forces. It’s tempt­ing, given the evil that the coun­try as a whole com­mit­ted, to go along with that. Then again, the guys fly­ing planes into build­ings a few years back also felt they were fight­ing a greater evil. I think most of the more neu­tral play­ers in the world would dis­agree with the valid­ity of both attacks.

“One must be care­ful when fight­ing mon­sters, lest one becomes a mon­ster one­self.“
~ Nietzsche

War tends to make us all into mon­sters. It’s a dif­fi­cult task to not go over that line. Have we in North Amer­ica become the mon­ster? I don’t know. Per­haps it’s a mon­stros­ity of a dif­fer­ent kind. More sub­tle than that of Ger­many dur­ing the 30s and 40s. We don’t con­quer with guns any more. We con­quer with the weight of our money and our tech­nol­ogy. We can sweep whole cul­tures away with debt relief and a few McDonald’s. But gosh, even as I crit­i­cize my impe­ri­al­is­tic roots, I can’t help but be incred­i­bly com­forted when I’m scared and lost in a for­eign coun­try — to sud­denly turn and see a famil­iar con­quer­ing piece of cor­po­rate Amer­ica. Finally, some­thing like home!

The church was rebuilt. That’s why you see the white stones. They’re the new ones. The iron in the stone oxi­dizes over the years, turn­ing the old ones to black. Give the new ones a few hun­dred years and even­tu­ally even the stains of war will be washed from this city.

Autumn in Edmonton

September 17th, 2005

Can you fall in love with a thought? Can a thought break your heart? I think you can. And I think it just did. And, you know, it’s not a bad way to be, really. Fall in love with the world. Let it break your heart. Fall in love with it again. Why not? What the hell else was I bank­ing on anyway?

Here I am, wan­der­ing around like a mad­man, eyes filled with the tragic beauty of autumn. Old things are dying to make way for the new. Whis­pers of win­ter float through the warm air. Soon enough it will just be too damn cold for any­thing to spark.

Nature bewitches me with its last cel­e­bra­tion before the big freeze. Sud­denly, there are all these bril­liant, earthy col­ors. While spring and sum­mer shine with the overt beauty of a Hol­ly­wood actress, all glossed up and per­fect for the big screen, autumn is that sweet girl next door who brings back your child­hood inno­cence — the one who makes you smile just think­ing about her. It’s real and gen­uine. The time slows and you savor the sim­plest moments. You find your­self wish­ing those moments could last forever.

I have no des­ti­na­tion today, but even a per­son with no des­ti­na­tion always finds him­self some­where. I won­der why it took me so long to be where I am right now?

There are oth­ers: sit­ting and writ­ing, some play­ing Fris­bee, some just pass­ing by. The air is elec­tric and I’m grin­ning ear to ear. I’m ready for a rev­o­lu­tion, and I’m nod­ding in agree­ment with every­thing around me.

These peo­ple. As I observe them, there’s that awful, hang­ing ques­tion: How many of them are observ­ing me? And how closely? To answer that, I guess I first have to answer an even more haunt­ing ques­tion: Who am I, really?

You see, some­where in here, there’s this per­son I call me, who’s made of some arbi­trary col­lec­tion of expe­ri­ences, rela­tion­ships, ideas, dreams, and biol­ogy. Some­thing beyond that me seems to be cre­at­ing a movie about life itself, about what it means, about how it’s beau­ti­ful or hor­ri­fy­ing or worth­while or not.

Who am I, really? Today, it almost seems like I am that movie direc­tor who is beyond me, but who is also within me. How can that be? And do I not also feel that I am the actor, the one who is being directed? What about the oth­ers? Are they actors or audi­ence? Or both?

Are they actors in my movie, or am I an actor in theirs?

This par­tic­u­lar movie screen is dif­fer­ent because it’s a two-way deal. The actors are also look­ing back out at the audi­ence, as if they don’t know they are the actors. I see now that we are one in the same, actors and audi­ence, and that we are all play­ing incred­i­bly com­plex and beau­ti­ful roles in this incred­i­bly com­plex and beau­ti­ful drama, called: “This is What Life’s All About!”

Even­tu­ally, I push myself to leave. I look back to where I was sit­ting moments ago and taste an over­whelm­ing melan­choly. Out­side of the moment, I now fully real­ize its wrench­ing beauty, and I won­der why I didn’t just stay there forever.

What is it that con­tin­u­ally pushes us out of Eden? Why are we always look­ing back­ward or for­ward? Why are we never just there?

Nos­tal­gia. Hold on to it, and you’re look­ing back five years from now, feel­ing the same regret about not enjoy­ing what you had because you were just too busy wish­ing it was another way.

The solu­tion sud­denly seems much too sim­ple: Let go.

Let life throw me about as it wills. Under­stand that I would not want it any other way. No effort. No strug­gle. Just a pro­found and pro­tect­ing peace, know­ing that I am exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to do. I won­der why my life so far has been more of an exer­cise in com­plex­ity than simplicity.

But then, the sim­plest things can be incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult some­times, can’t they?

I wave good­bye and lose myself in a maze of side streets. There are these beau­ti­ful old houses, each one with its unique, mag­i­cal char­ac­ter, and I feel a bit like I did as a small child. Curios­ity. Won­der. Love. When exactly did I start to need more than that? I feel like skip­ping and twirling in spi­rals through the streets, like I would if I were an actor in a musi­cal, but an adult doesn’t do such silly things. There was a time for that and now it’s gone. That’s what it means to grow up, right? Appar­ently, as one gets older, the time is for any joy­less and need­less sac­ri­fice to mas­quer­ade itself as wisdom.

Time. I’m sud­denly not so sure there’s much sense in keep­ing track of it any more. Why count down the sec­onds towards an uncer­tain future? Why stare long­ingly into a fad­ing and fic­tional past? It’s a pretty mag­i­cal world out there — and things are chang­ing by the minute. Why not just flow with the Tao?

And so I come full cir­cle, back to the begin­ning of this strange day, inside a moment that is enough to jus­tify all of exis­tence. You see, in this par­tic­u­lar moment, I can’t help the feel­ing that I’m sit­ting in the very cen­ter of things — at the cen­ter of the magic the­ater. All of these sounds… all at once. I’m find­ing my zen in the splash of the leg­is­la­ture foun­tains, as would be the clas­sic image… but also in the rise and fall of engines as these big metal beasts race all around me on var­i­ous streets that sur­round this oasis of seren­ity. It all seems so dis­tant, yet so close. So familiar.

I watch a kid with his par­ents. The kid is rolling on the ground beside his dad. They look down, amused by their son’s choice of travel. He sim­ply refuses to walk. It’s more fun rolling, even if it is more dif­fi­cult to make turns that way.

Kids are pretty cool. I envy the joy­ous free­dom that I see, and I won­der again when exactly it was that I gave that free­dom up. I don’t even remem­ber putting up a fight.

But then, this has always been our jour­ney — the redis­cov­ery of what we’ve always known, the recov­ery of what we’ve always had.