Excerpt From the Save Bill Kapoun Facebook Page

soundtrack: hit play and start reading.
Scroll down. Please. Seriously -- the images with the song are . . . not related. But "Send Me On My Way" by Rusted Root is one of the best road songs I know, and more appropriate to the tone of the passage I'm posting than another sad song.



Bill (or Will) Kapoun was the English teacher in Seoul who was hospitalized after an apartment fire and later died from his injuries. These words are from the Save Bill Kapoun Facebook group: Bill's sister, Laura posted some of Bill's writings on the site, as a kind of tribute and thank you to those who have (and still are) helping Bill's family. I, and a lot of the other expats in Korea, have gotten kind of involved in this guy's story; he's been on my mind all week.

While the inciting event is a terrible tragedy, it's kind of beautiful to see such an outpouring of concern for a fellow human, and it's really restored my faith in the expat community in Korea, which can sometimes come across as a bunch of privileged (predominantly) whiteys pointing condescending fingers at the flaws in Korea's culture as a way of dealing with culture-shock (all the while getting paid handsomely by the same ones whom we judge and criticize) and then sometimes taking aim at each other instead, for variety. I'm guilty of it too.

Anyway, seeing this kind of communication reminds me why we're overseas to begin with, and it's a refreshing look at that so, so human search for meaning:

excerpted from the Save Bill Kapoun Facebook Group, written by Bill (or Will) Kapoun, posted by Laura Kapoun.

Preach it, Bill.

"...The semester before I went to Ireland I had been living the life of a typical frat guy in a typical American college and was dealing with my first serious break-up. Going to Europe was nothing like what I had expected. I thought I was going to be partying and meeting girls all the time. I thought I would be taking the life I had been leading in America to a new level. Instead I started a completely different life. I met almost no girls during those five months, I had almost no friends and I had almost no fun. At the end of that time I started reflecting on my entire life, on my past and on my future and I realized that there were many parts of it that were not at all how I had planned or how I wanted them to be. I saw large chunks of my earthly days completely wasted, unappreciated and unused and it sickened me. I started writing about it. My writing was then immature as was my outlook on my life. I do not claim maturity or ability in either life or writing now, but I see myself going in the right direction in both attempts. When I first started travelling I spent a few days walking around capital cities with a stupid look on my face and a guide book in my hands. Today I spent my morning digging for clams in a mud bank on the Algarvan coast of southern Portugal before spending my morning trying to sell tickets to go dolphin sightseeing. Afterwards I went on a hike to collect almonds, oranges and sage to cook the mussels I collected off the shore (mussels are much easier to find than clams), which I cooked on a hotplate in my rented room which overlooks the bay of a small fishing town. So I have come a long way, as a writer, as a traveler and as a person. Or at least I hope. . . .

"That was life, when I wrote that. I was really living. Despair is life, pain is life. . . . Happiness is life, laughter is life, there are so many kinds of life, but I, like so many of us, did hardly any living, instead I spent most of my time looking forward, always anticipating, one day, yeah, one day, if I just keep waiting, planning, one day, I'll be happy, I'll be living.

". . . In retrospect, we remember, we give credence to our waiting, proof that living life is possible, but if we are truthful to ourselves, we remember, most of those past days were either days we had wished had gone sooner at the time, or were just the beginning of the list of days hoping.

"It wasn't until I started traveling that I realized that not only does life not have to be that way; it isn't meant to be that way. . . . The natural world we spent most of existence alongside, already physically distant becomes emotionally even further when we don't celebrate and enjoy it.
. . .I have become a better person by seeing the world; there is much more that I hope to see and experience, but above all, I hope that by sharing my experiences, others will feel compelled to push themselves; and be reborn into a world without limits, where everything is possible and the pursuit of the new and beautiful takes the place of security and seclusion.

"On its most superficial level traveling allows us to see and discover new and beautiful things, on a slightly deeper level it allows us to know more about our neighbors in the rest of the world, which is one of the things America needs the most right now, but at its deepest level the greatest gift of traveling is the personal journey that allows us to see our own likes and dislikes, passions and perversions, history and future, under a completely different light. Only then can we be truly satisfied for; truly, many will shed a tear when we pass from this world, but besides our nearest loved ones, our days on this earth are quickly forgotten. Few will remember us a year later. The things we do, the attainment of the goals we spend so much time striving for, all mean little beyond the here and now. That is why, when I die, all I hope people to say of me is he lived life. The good, the bad, he took it all in, and relished it. Yes, he lived life for life. Which is how we should all live our lives, never letting a precious moment slip by.

William Kapoun

Enough said. Thanks for that, Bill.

Sincerely:
Roboseyo


Remember: you can still help his family with the huge hospital bills.

Part two: The Advent of Meaning. . . at least for one guy.

This is the second part of a two-part post. Please read the first part first, here.

Rilke again, 'cause dammit, he deserves to be read twice. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"
(still elegy number 10)

Another pitfall:

I am surprised and amazed at how impatient people who grieve can be, for their own wholeness (myself included). I am dismayed, but not quite as surprised, at how impatient OTHER people can be with mourners, dispensing Bible verses like medical prescriptions and declaring the issue done with. "Why are you still sad? I told you to give your grief to God a month ago!"

When Bruce Lee injured his back in 1970, he spent six months in bed, reading, because if he took a short-cut or rushed his recovery process, he would have put a ceiling on his own post-recovery ability, or worse, re-injured himself. The human body needs recovery time for injuries. That's just how it works. (Bonus points: I just compared myself to Bruce Lee! I kick ass!) Seriously, though, why do I think my heart would work any other way than the rest of me? The only part of me that can change quickly is my mind, and even then, the mind often has to wait for the heart to catch up -- that's why it was so hard to break up with exgirlfriendoseyo, even when I could see that we had no future.

I finally realized it's OK to say "actually, my life is pretty shitty right now," instead of "God is teaching me patience", when my friend wrote "I think God honours honesty more than anything else we try to give him" in an e-mail. I'll buy that. Isn't that what the entire book of Job is about: finding an honest answer instead of a quick answer? Also: thanks for that, Mel.

I believe an honest doubt honours God more than a blind faith, and waiting for real meaning is more beautiful, and more consecrated, than skipping to a rote, ready-made meaning, even if the quick answer comes in the form of a bible verse. I think an afternoon volunteering at an orphanage or a soup kitchen honours God more than either of those. (And helping others can do wonders for one's own hurt.)

During the dark, disappointed, meaningless parts, I found comfort remembering that during the wait for a messiah, God made Israel the nation it needed to be, not through a series of growing successes, but through a string of spectacular failures. (Don't believe me? Go read Numbers, Judges, and Chronicles.) Ditto for Saint Peter. The word Israel does not mean "He Who Has All His Shit Together" or "He Who's Squared Things Up With God". Israel means, "He Who WRESTLES with God," and what a wonderful name for a chosen people!

So after all that grief, after avoiding those false trails, where am I now? What meaning HAVE I found? Well, my ideas about God are very different than they used to be, and I think that's a good thing. There's a lot more honesty in the mix now, and a lot more knowledge of my weaknesses.

I no longer think of faith as a helicopter, lowering a ladder from the sky, to rescue me from my griefs -- I think now that faith is more like a walking companion, someone with well-worn shoes and holes in the knees, who doesn't always know the way, and certainly doesn't have all the answers, but who'll point out a root across the path, or pick me up after I trip on it, who makes interesting observations about the trail, who'd have my back in a pinch, and who's always good company. No, he doesn't make the path shorter, but at least he makes the time pass faster, and maybe from time to time, he just happens to have an umbrella when I really need one, or a pocketknife, or a joke that helps me laugh through a windstorm. In my diary, four months before my mom died, I wrote "I want a faith like a steel cable: tough, flexible, and useful." Maybe I'm closer to that now than I was before, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

I'm beginning to think it's OK not to be out of the woods, maybe that's not a statement of despair, but a statement of hope, hope that there's still more to be learned, if I keep myself open to learning. Maybe admitting "I'm not out of the woods yet" authentically IS the best thing I can come away with, and maybe The Lesson I've Learned is that life doesn't fit in boxes, nor needs to: Things I've Figured Out quickly become Prejudices, if I decide I don't have to keep thinking about them. Maybe some honest stumbling about in the woods IS an act of worship, and by being OK with that, or even celebrating that, it might even become a celebration of the fact we need never cease our search for meaning, that every part of our life can continue being deepened and enriched, long after we stop feeling sad.

"Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. . . .
How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you."

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Tenth Elegy, Opening)

I wrote this for Tamie's Advent blog, but I'll post it here in two parts.

Without advent, Christmas arrives through the side door, and startles me while I'm brushing my teeth for bed. With advent, it enters with fanfare, as the culmination and final satisfaction of a month-long buildup. Opening presents is the fun of Christmas, but lighting candles and reading Isaiah, looking forward to something just beyond my fingertips, is the feeling of Christmas.

Waiting is the most underrated, quickly-forgotten experience-enhancer: nothing improves a food's taste more than hunger, yet nobody thinks fondly back on hovering by the oven door, sniffing for the smell of roast turkey: caroling, presents, stuffing and snowball fights monopolize our nostalgia. Advent, though, is soaked in waiting, it drips with anticipation.

So many of us live our lives between our reach and our grasp, waiting for. . . something, and the thing between my reach and my grasp for the last two years was another very human thing: meaning.

Meaning is the rope that lashes us to the pier. It's the string wound out, that will lead me back out of the maze after battling the minotaur. "Man's Search For Meaning," (highly recommended) by Victor Frankl (a concentration camp survivor), says that meaning has the power to make any ordeal bearable, as long as we can firmly believe that our trial brings us closer to a greater goal.

Losing meaning is a scary thing - people lash out and lose rationality when their lives' meaning is merely DISPARAGED (when somebody says, "You should quit your job and raise kids" or "Just a house-mom? I thought you'd amount to more than that" hackles rise, fast. As for religious debate -- well, nobody ever strapped a bomb on his body to prove "Pet Sounds" is better than "Sergeant Pepper"). To actually lose meaning is downright terrifying -- how do you measure anything when you don't trust your own reference points anymore? Friedrich Nietzsche described it this way:

"We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean. . . but. . . you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. . . and there is no longer any 'land'!"

In the space of six months from late 2005 to early 2006, I lost my mother, the woman I'd intended to marry, and several other things that were crucial to the person I believed myself to be. When my mom died of stomach cancer at age 53, I was at her deathbed. Being right there to hear her stop breathing was like being at ground zero of a meaning-grenade blast. Later, breaking up with the girl I loved was another such blast. By April 2006, every mooring was loose - I had the rope in my hand, but the other end wasn't tied anywhere! I was like a cat in zero gravity.



(hee hee hee)

The layers of meaning that had kept me warm were torn off like shrapnel shredding a winter coat, and nobody can survive winter, naked in the snow. But, I also didn't want to drape myself about with the nearest rags, overestimate my preparedness, head into the storm, and freeze anyway.

When it comes to searching for meaning, "Any port in a storm," is not enough, and I didn't want to short-circuit my own search for meaning. The German poet Rilke (one of my best friends), says, in his tenth Duino Elegy,

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"

Sure, things were going badly, but I didn't want to squander my hours of pain, to short-cut through them and thus waste them, if I could instead come through them richer, deep green with tough foliage, rooted with place, foundation and home.

See, sometimes it seems like the world takes a perverse pleasure in poking our softest spots (it actually doesn't: sometimes life sucks, but it's nothing personal. Just trust me on this one). Faced with disillusionments that are sometimes sudden and forceful, like a nuclear bomb, and other times slow and soul-sapping, like a trench war, short cuts are easier than gritting teeth and gutting through life's challenges. Bad ports are rife in the storm, and inviting.

To boot. . .

I used to say things like, "God is teaching me patience." There's nothing wrong with saying that, and sometimes there's deep truth there. Sometimes, though, skipping to the lesson one wants to learn from a situation is a way of hijacking any true learning that might have happened.

Consider this analogy: in university, I studied literature, and discovered that there's a huge difference between reading The Great Gatsby for its colour imagery, and actually reading the Great Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it. Sure, if colour imagery (or Freudian symbolism, or power and gender relations: pick your essay topic from those listed on the handout) is what I'm looking for, I'll find it -- but if that's all I'm looking for, a lot of other things might pass me by.

I didn't want to be like Prince Humperdink (skip to 1:58 in the clip if you can), bellowing "Skip to the end!" instead of bearing through the full marriage ritual.



So, instead of "squandering my hours of pain", instead of just saying, "Skip to the end. . . say Man and Wife!" I wanted to dig in deep, and commit to every step of the journey through the dark valley -- because you never know which patch of mud in that valley has diamonds in it, especially if you're only scanning the tree-branches for silver apples, or thinking about the beef stew at the hostel on the other side.


Another shoddy port for the storm:

One Sunday, I heard a pastor tell a story about his brother-in-law being senselessly murdered in a parking lot by street thugs. The shock-power of the story silenced everyone, and the pastor intoned, "That story just proves that life is war. . . spiritual war," the theme of his sermon.

If that really was all he learned from his brother's death, what a narrow, embittering grief he must have had! And if it wasn't, I thought with outrage, how dare he exploit his brother-in-law's murder, using it as a prop for his own message, to shock people into listening! I wondered how many other themes he'd tacked onto that tragedy, and whether he realized his lurid tactics left such a sour taste.

It is wrong, and it trivializes a tragedy, to put a false meaning in, where one is waiting for a true meaning. The pastor who blamed the 9/11 attacks on the US Government's tolerance of gays ought to be. . .what's the religious leader's equivalent of disbarred? Publicly and loudly reproached, at least. Ditto for the pastors who blame the Colombine shootings on politicians' taking prayer out of school (did any of you get that e-mail forward, too?).

There are some situations in life where, when faced with such difficult realities, the only appropriate response is deep, sad, and searching silence. No parent who has lost a child deserves to have her child's death used as a political platform, and it dishonours my mother's death, and cheapens the entire rest of my journey, if I twist that tragedy to reinforce my own prejudices. I'd rather wait for something true. The meaning will come, but meaning can be like a shy cat: sometimes we have to stop yapping, clicking and beckoning, before it'll approach.


(part two. . .)

Bud, holy cow!

I just went to the Seoul Museum of Art, and saw Vincent Van Gogh. This guy...

you know the difference between looking at pictures of your friend, and actually sitting down and chatting -- you know the way NOBODY gets your vacation photos the way you do, just because bud, the food looks great in the picture, but they didn't get to eat it, and you did.

Well, dear readers, art is like that too. I didn't actually see Vincent VanGogh. He died. Quite a while ago, now. But if you think these pictures are impressive -- wow! You really gotta see them in person. The paint on the canvas, the little knots of colour, the texture that jumps out at you -- it's like the difference between a photo album and a person (which makes sense, but still didn't really click until I saw these in person).


This one was there. Girlfriendoseyo disagrees with me, but I think Van Gogh was overwhelmed by the sun. The sun seems so close here -- it strikes me even as being accusing. The sun almost totally dominates just about every painting where it appears in Van Gogh's work. The field is so mundane next to that glaring eye. You can barely even see the birds eating the sower's seeds -- they're totally irrelevant next to that sun.

I stared at this one for about three minutes without blinking. I don't know how, but Vincent got to me, like a fisher with his hook, he got a hold of something in me.


This next one wasn't in the exhibit, but you can see here, too, Van Gogh's feeling about the sky. I said to Girlfriendoseyo today -- Raphael's or Vermeer's paintings are so perfect, so realistic, it's like they're just seeing. Picasso's paintings are so intuitive, so emotional, it's like they're just feeling. Van Gogh sees and feels. It's amazing how raw and visceral these paintings are in person.


This one WAS in the exhibit, and Girlfriendoseyo and I were both totally gobsmacked. I just can not convey to you how powerful this painting is in person. I really can't. Even if you eat the computer screen where the painting is displayed, you won't be as deeply impressed by it as we were. Go, seek it out, and see it yourself.


This next painting was there too, the only of his self portraits (I think).

This one broke my heart, and also caught hold of me for several minutes: every line said, "dude, I've lived a f***ing rough life." He died at age 37, but this, one of his early paintings, already looks about fifty.


Everybody loves these next three. . . they weren't at the exhibit, but they might have been too much for me if they were. My old roomie Anthony once told me the story of his buddy, the self-proclaimed "biggest Bjork fan in the world", who, when he got the chance to see Bjork perform live, ended up having to leave the auditorium after the first few songs, completely overwhelmed with the power of his experience. I scoffed at the story then, and called dude an idiot for flinching away from a potential high-point in his life. . . but now I think I might understand a bit.

Considering how these three are still amazing, gorgeous, and fresh to me, even though they pop up of every tea room wall, on every Starbucks mug, in every poster-shop window. . . to actually see them in person, to have their impact amplified that much -- I might have to look away for a while, too, before staring into the sun like that.



Dear Lord, the man's night skies were breathtaking!

This one WAS there. In person, it's almost a different painting entirely.

And I wish I could explain what he does with flowers. . . but there's just no way. (This is why people write poems, I suppose.)


This wasn't at the exhibit, but again, look how he just lays his soul bare in the skies. The indoor still life paintings' backgrounds were totally flat and dull, but this Vincent fellow, he had some kind of a thing about skies.

Thanks to him, now I do, too.


Wasn't at the exhibit, but just -- wow. Just wow.


I love painters.
The German poet Rilke (my personal poetry hero) wrote, in the First Duino Elegy

"already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world"

And this is why artists draw -- because there doesn't have to be a story, or a meaning, or anything but a field and a sky. . . but that field, and that sky -- WOW!

Here it is! Be amazed!

We're right back to that again, aren't we? Can't that sometimes be enough? Can't that sometimes be the entire end and purpose of some art? As John Keats said,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

But with words, Keats had to say beauty is truth. These painters just show something beautiful, and they don't even have to add a single layer of interpretation if they don't want to, and they can just leave it at "here it is. be amazed."

(Girl With a Pearl Earring, by another Dutch guy who was pretty good: Vermeer. Here it is. It's beautiful. Be amazed.)

Yeah, sometimes there's other stuff in there, too. . . but there doesn't have to be. With writing, it's almost impossible not to add in a little pontification, a little theme or interpretation or explanation -- it's why I get bummed every time I read Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey -- he starts off with a "here it is. be amazed" and then starts adding other stuff. Sometimes in other poems, he got it right, got it pure, but often he was so busy explaining the perfection of his moments, or describing his own feelings, that he clouds the beauty with too many traces of his own voice -- kind of like an amazing photograph with a text line across the middle of the composition saying, "taken on a fuji finepix E550"

For your benefit, I've created a visual representation of what I mean. Which of these pictures would you rather have on your wall?




Here's a Picasso painting I talked about in a previous post.

I love about Picasso that he stripped away everything in his paintings except the things he decided were important for that particular painting.

Form? Not needed.
Proportion? Why?
Perspective? Does it serve the painting's main theme?
Conventional Placement Of Body Parts? Let's talk about that again later.

But what he DID keep in his painting, distorted, exaggerated, or rearranged for proper emphasis, maintained the exact emotional content of his subject, even when the recognizable form was long gone, and so, even though you wouldn't recognize her to pass her on the street, you FEEL this woman crying (the painting is named "La Femme Qui Pleure" - the woman who cries), more (or at least as) clearly and authentically than/as a hundred photos of women actually crying.


The other thing I love love love about Picasso is his face. Look at his eyes. Those are eyes that have been trained, for an entire lifetime, to see into the heart of things, and find wonder there. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." That he not only learned how to SEE the world that way, but was also skilled or intuitive enough to translate what he saw onto canvas is as much a miracle as the way Mozart heard the music perfectly in his head, or the way Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony while stone-deaf, or the way John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison managed to be born in the same city, in the same era, and meet each other.

Even when he's very old, you still see a child in his eyes. You see a mind still open. Still dancing.

That kind of wise simplicity appears from time to time, in somebody's eyes. . . not even in every artist, though. My favourite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, has a sharper edge in his eyes.

but it doesn't surprise me that someone who uses words (which are basically boxes, categories, and judgements impressed upon the things that actually reach one's senses) would have a sharper edge than someone who uses colours and shapes to lay bare his soul.



Would you believe that behind those eyes lies one of the finest religious-scholarly minds on the planet?

I hope, when I'm an old man, I have eyes as encompassing, innocent, and simple, as that.

But more than that, I hope they look that way because I've worked my whole life to see the world simply and wonderfully (wonderful meaning full of wonder, of course), and maybe even that I've been clever enough to transmit some of that tight-packed wonder into some books that other people can read.

How long does it take to write a poem like Rilke, or paint a painting like Picasso, or a story like JD Salinger?

A few hours, or a few days, or a few months. . . and an entire lifetime, of course.

Not the FULL meaning of life, but a good chunk of it, I think.

Finally: yes, it's true. Fall is gasping into winter here in Korea. Last night I chatted with friends, eating sushi, and looked out the window as the wind showered leaves down from the trees onto the street.

Huge floppy leaves streamed into a dark little side street. No picture, but it was sure beautiful. Fall is waning, and the multicoloured leaves are falling fast, to make room for winter's starkness.

(PS: A bald tree in front of a streetlight is a really beautiful thing -- the way the thinnest twigs catch the light in a halo makes me think of spiderwebs.)

Next morning, street looked like this:


Unfortunately, some of those leaf piles concealed restaurants' compost bags, so it was a bit risky to stomp through them, and this pile (and many others) were big enough to conceal a sleeping hobo (who prefer to be left alone, rather than kicked by big kids like me), so I was a little cautious dragging my feet through them and letting the leafy crunchy sound fill my head up with happy-sauce and happy-sense.

I love the vein pattern of these kinds of leaves.


Today is Sunday. I walked with Matt for a good two hours this afternoon, on a riverside, a hill, and a university campus, talking (which was nice) but basically just being out in the middle of fall, letting the wind blow around us, and being alive. Fall in Korea is heaven, I swear. Even in the city, and even more in the country.

Trees are so beautiful. In the words of Annie Dillard: "You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?" Sure glad God decided to go for the glamour and make something really, really, ridiculously good-looking instead. My friend Anna once used the word gratuitous, as in "We have a gratuitous god" and I'd have to say the beauty set into the world around us is absolutely gratuitous -- totally unnecessary! Beauty for beauty's sake alone! Almost shocking to my sensibilities, if I actually think about it, and definitely an apalling degree of overkill -- one tree ought to be enough beauty for any city in its entirety, yet instead, we're just overwhelmed by them, so much that we don't even think twice about cutting down these miracles of beauty and function!

Trees and colours against the sky: here's late fall in Seoul (today was the first properly cold day in Seoul -- gloves instead of pockets, heavy coats instead of layers).


Yet somehow the bamboo trees kept ALL their green.


Next: a path. With colours. I wish you could have been there. The green and red on the path is recycled car tires or something -- it makes the surface very pleasant and springy for walking or jogging.


Certain trees' leaves curl up like a hand when the cold gets to them. It's a bit hard to see this one, but imagine an entire tree where instead of falling, the leaves have curled up into fists -- not unlike some people who curl themselves up in the cold (instead of just going inside). Almost like Christmas tree ornaments.


This was a little tree grove in Kyunghee university: every leaf colour imaginable was somewhere in the grove, layered above and below the other colours. The leaves hadn't been swept up or rained upon, so they gave a really nice crunch underfoot. Matt and I lay down on our backs and stared up at the layers of leaf-colours and bare branches.


Like this. There were a few hundred birds in the grove, pipping and singing away, and the people walking by gave the ground a rustle. The sun was just low enough in the sky to come in from the side, and it was as if the sunlight plugged the colours in, threw a switch and set them blazing.



This (below) was the view from on our backs, looking up at the leaves. The sun and the leaves and the breeze and the birds joined together in an act either of love or of worship (or maybe both, if that's not too blasphemous or superlative for you). It was cold enough to see our breath, and every direction had a different mix of colours. The picture is two dimensional so it's hard to see how the leaves were layered one above the other, but I tell you, the rocks and trees were singing today.


After five or ten minutes (or maybe it was thirty seconds, or maybe it was five days -- it doesn't matter) Matt stood up and said to me, "Congratulations. You have taken part in a perfect moment in time." And he couldn't have been more right if a voice from the sky had spoken along with him, and then a mysterious hand had materialized and given him a high-five.

I can't find the exact quote, but I came across a spot where Steven Hawking said something to the effect that, of all the possible universes that could have existed, isn't it interesting that the one we live in, the one that DID come about, was one that contained creatures who could contemplate it, and wonder at it. Whether this leads us to proof of some creator or not, the fact remains, the universe constantly screams out "HERE I AM! BE AMAZED!", and we, humans, are lucky enough to have the capacity to do exactly that, and from there, even to search for a meaning to it all. Thank God! Framed in religious terms, the entire world was worshipping God today, and calling all the people in Seoul to worship with it. It was absolutely transcendental, and yet also absolutely embodied, rooted in the Here and Now of creation, and I don't know if there needs to be any more meaning to an autumn day than "Autumn is beautiful" and "Here I am! Be amazed!".

Here it is. Be amazed.



The earth is visible in this picture of Saturn.







And look at this one again, too. Just soak it in. It's as beautiful as a liturgy. . . I don't know if the picture is, but the moment sure was.

A chapel is a beautiful place to worship, sometimes (I'm thinking of those cathedrals that create a space of holiness by their mere design). . . but when God builds a place of worship, it's never exactly the same for two days in a row, and that says something.


Sometimes I think that's enough meaning for life -- just that it's so darn full of beauty. Some stories have no real meaning except "here's a great story" and some autumn days are the same, and seeing that, and accepting and enjoying it for exactly what it is: breathtaking beauty -- is an act of worship to whichever deity one chooses to credit. I'm glad I'm alive! Thanks, God, for giving me senses!



Other stuff:

The trivial:

how many song references can you spot/recognize in this chart?

It's Autumn in Korea. . . hang in there and I'll tell you about it. If you remember Josh Barkey from university, here's his blog, and a post that I really enjoyed -- a cool perspective on sin, if you will.

Some pictures, just to increase the tease.

In a city as crowded as Seoul, sometimes parking solutions get creative.


From a hostess bar: white fetish, schoolgirl fetish, the name of the bar (if you can't see it) is "better than beer". Matt and I decided there were probably no white girls OR school uniforms on the premises. . . and it wouldn't take much for it to be better than beer anyway, given the quality of Korea's local brews. Won't find me in there checking, though.


A little konglish

Grasping and veering: the moment

The moment

so here's the thing.

In the effort of giving one's all, of being actually In The Moment, appreciating The Here And Now, there are pitfalls.

I've recently had trouble with the old cliche that you ought to live each day as if it were your last, because that's a non-viable lifestyle. If I woke up this morning and Gabrielle the messenger angel visited me in the shower and told me that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'd be dead by midnight that day, I'd make a certain set of choices:

What would you do?

I'd find a way to be with as many of the ones I love as possible; I'd eat the best food I knew; I'd write a letter or phone the people I could not have around me; if I were in Korea, I might try to cheat time by flying to Vancouver, crossing the international date line, and stealing an extra sixteen or seventeen hours. I'd do my damndest to die happy, whatever that means.

The thing is, I can't live each day as if it were my last. That's a pretty manic kind of day, jettisoning all responsibilities, etc.. I'd get fired after two days of living each day as if it were my last. You see the problem.

That silly old adage, I suppose, is actually intended to encourage people to live without fear, and maybe also, to live with an integrity such that, if one DID die suddenly, one could stand before God and say one has no regrets, if nothing else.

One part of that, I think, is living in the moment: being mindful of the world around, of the wonders visible all around creation, to be fully Present for the experience of being alive. That requires its own kind of courage -- to know, and then live according to, one's priorities, rather than other's perceptions, measurements, or expectations, is important to actually finding joy.

I think there are many ways we get trapped out of really Being Present, but recently I've been thinking about two in particular: veering and grasping.

I said to Girlfriendoseyo once, "There are some things that can't be fully experienced if you hesitate." This is especially true of relationships, I think. If my default approach is caution, if I'm hedging my bets before I know anything, I might shut myself off from something real, because I wanted to stay safe. My old roommate Anthony taught me the word velleity -- it means "the lowest level of motivation" -- that vague hankering one never gets around to acting upon. "I should work out more." "It was a long time ago, but I ought to apologize, really." Often the old objection, "sounds too much like work" prevents us from really investing and getting passionate about something. Sometimes, we're just afraid of what it might demand of us if we really pour ourselves into something.

A sports writer I like (Bill Simmons) discussed this in a column once as it applies to sports: some athletes DON'T prepare the best they can for their sport, so that they have an excuse ready if they fail -- if Quarterback A loses the big game, he thinks "I'll work out this off-season, instead of just drinking beer and driving my motorcycle" -- his excuse is ready-made because of his own lack of effort. He let himself down, but he can boast that "I could have won the game if I wanted". If Quarterback B loses the big game, he has nothing to fall back on -- "I trained and prepared, brought myself to the absolute peak of my ability physically and mentally. . . and I STILL failed." That's a much lonelier failure, because there's nowhere to hide. Some people do the same with relationships -- "I've been hurt before, so I'll hold back on this new one, so that I'm limiting how much she could hurt me, if it doesn't work out" -- but holding onto that old baggage might keep me from reaching the peak of the mountain! Maybe the loss hurts more if one's fully invested, but I'd much rather have a "gave it my best and it didn't work out" in my past than a "woulda coulda shoulda" -- I think the regret of woulda coulda shoulda's linger longer.

On the other hand, I realized another way people shut themselves out of truly experiencing a moment last Saturday: Girlfriendoseyo and I walked out to the middle of Mapo bridge on the Han River in Seoul, because over by 63 Building (the tallest building in Korea), there was a fireworks festival. I opened my eyes wide and watched, taking in as much as I could, from the delay between flash and boom, because of the distance, to the jostling of crowds, to the whistling of traffic conductors keeping people off the lanes still open to traffic. A large (huge) number of others, instead of watching the fireworks, held their cameras up in the air, pointed them at the fireworks, clicked, and checked in the display screen for what they had. Instead of enjoying the moment, they removed themselves a step from the actual experience, by filtering it through a camera. Taking a picture of something as ephemeral as fireworks strikes me as completely defeating the purpose of going to a fireworks show, unless you're a pyrotechnician yourself, collecting data on your rivals.

They may as well have stayed home and watched them on TV, or downloaded clips of fireworks displays from the internet! Why go in person if you're not going to BE there? (Yes, that's Be with a capital B.) Some moments are like water -- they're meant to run through your fingers and be gone, and if you catch water in a bowl, it loses a lot of the beauty it had when it was in motion, jumping over rocks and scattering light in every direction.

Camera culture is strange to me -- cameras only catch one of the five senses, and give no sense of story, and to me, if it's not a story, it's not a memory. My best memories from Malaysia are tastes, running jokes, textures of food or sand, sounds and voices. Ditto for my trips to Japan. You can't take a picture of washing all that sand down the shower drain after spending a day at the beach; you could, but it wouldn't show that little bit of sand that ALWAYS goes in the wrong direction. Even the dancers I saw in Osaka, if I took a picture of them, would have lost the excitement and motion that imprinted them on my memory. Cameras can't catch any of that, so I always feel that pictures are terribly inadequate keepsakes of a place, unless they bring about the memory of a story.

The main thing is just this: a camera removes me from the Here And Now by one step -- I'm now seeing the world through a viewfinder instead of through my eyes -- and looking at the picture is poorer again than the viewfinder display. Even more, the taking of a picture is an attempt to make permanent moments that are often best appreciated for their very fleeting nature, and stepping back from those times of spontaneous fun often kills the spirit of fun anyway.

I feel like I cheat myself out of truly experiencing life if I hesitate and guard myself, and I also limit myself by trying to keep moments that are meant to pass by. (Veering away, or grasping too tight.) Some rare pictures catch something more than just the images -- an expression, a sense of love between two people, or a sense of fun, and some people are really good at catching that (I'm thinking of my brother-in-law's pictures from my father's wedding), but for me, I'd rather open my eyes as wide as possible, turn on my senses, and experience things, as fully as I can.

And later, I can write about it.

One nice thing about cameras, and their attempt to catch things (though it removes me a little from my Here And Now) is that, though it doesn't bring back the smells and sounds for me, it DOES allow me to share my life with people who couldn't be there with me.

(Irony alert)

Here are some pictures I took from a Eulalia festival in Seoul, in Sky Park near World Cup Stadium in Seoul, where I went with Girlfriendoseyo, complained about people who hide from reality behind cameras, and then took about a dozen pictures, hypocrite that I am.

But I did it for YOU, my wonderful readers. I hope you like them.


They look like wheat, but they're about six feet tall.



The reason there's a whole park full of them is because when the sun is low in the sky, they blaze with pure white, catching the sunlight like a spider-web.



In full blossom, from close up.

I have no idea of the purpose of these plants, but they're sure pretty.


In the low sun:


They looked much nicer in person (back to that old "why bother to capture it" thing)

The one drawback: you can never quite pretend you're in the countryside when there are so many people,

when there are mounted lights (for the open-air concert to start later, and to light up the plants in the evening)


And when speakers ALL through the park are playing the Korean pop-song equivalent to Roy Orbison.

This post has a bad word in it.

If posting a comic that uses the "F" word will change your opinion of me. . . I'm sorry I disappointed you. But I'm not apologizing, because real life has the "F" word in it, too, sometimes. (And nudity -- parents are STRONGLY cautioned that some parts of real life may not be suitable for viewing by small children, families, or the discernment-impaired.)



XKCD is a comic my brother-in-law showed me. It varies from way over my head, to extremely nerdy, to awesome, and from "I know I got it but it really wasn't funny" to snarky, to drop-dead-hilarious. Here's a recent issue. I like it.


As the comic homepage itself says:

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

My dad gets married tomorrow.

A good counsellor, a good listener, and a good conversationalist will allow a person to set the terms of the conversation, rather than guiding the conversation to his/her own personal conversation comfort zones through too much talking, conversation manipulation, or leading questions. Good listeners get out of the way, and only assert their presence enough to keep the speaker moving in the right direction.


I think the best poems are that way, too: rather than TELLING you what you ought to see, and feel about a particular instant in time, a good poem just says "Look." and lets you taste a little experience, and good poets will put you right there beside them, so much that you don't even notice their presence: you're just sitting there yourself, looking at the same thing a poet noticed once.


It sounds so simple to use words to clear a way for a reader's own imagination to find a beautiful space, but then, it sounds so simple get a medical doctorate: just go to school for years, and work really hard! It's easy, too, I suppose, to be successful in business: find a need, fill it better than your competition, and make sure people find out! Easy peasy, lemon squeezey!


Rilke said, "Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines."


Here are some poems worth a lifetime of gathering sweetness, because instead of just saying


HEY READER! HERE IS SOME SWEETNESS I FOUND, AND NOW I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT!


the poet just says: "I was here." or, even better, "look"


and why do the poems need to MEAN anything more than what they say, really? can't it be enough to say, "a frog jumped into a pond. Plop." (that's a loose translation of the most famous haiku ever written)


(all translated by Kevin O'Rourke, from a book on Korean Poetry I carry with me every day)


Ha Wiji:
(untitled -- but a perfect, perfect picture)


The guests have gone; the gate is closed;
the breeze has dropped; the moon is sinking low,
I open the wine-jar again and recite a verse of poetry.
Perhaps this
is all the joy a recluse ever knows.





Evening; Self Portrait
by Cho Byunghwa


I've cast off in life what may be cast off;
I've cast off in life what may not be cast off,
and here I am, just as you see me.




Prank
by Kim Namju


A sunbeam
the size of a
chipmunk's tail
sits
on the doorstep
of my cell.
I'd like to scissor slice it,
pop it down my throat,
melt my frozen body
as spring snow melts.






(this next one is the best erotic poem I've ever read)
hwang chini


I'll cut a piece from the side
of this interminable winter night
and wind it in coils beneath the bedcovers, warm and fragrant as the spring breeze,
coil by coil
to unwind it the night my lover returns.





if you don't like poetry, tough. Maybe my next post will be about the transformers movie or my favourite foods in Canada or trucks and shiny power tools. But for now, think about something beautiful you've seen, and how YOU'd share it with the people around you.


I have to go to bed now. My dad's getting married tomorrow.


love

Rob

My Neighbour Totoro: Movie time.

First, a mini-rant.

I hate, hate, hate, when all children's movies (and books, for that matter) must have a bad guy.

Sure, this is more dramatic -- Jafar (Aladdin), Gaston (Beauty and the Beast), Lord Farquaad (Shrek) were sure fun to despise -- there's no denying that. However, real life usually doesn't have such clean-cut good guys and bad guys, and it does a disservice to children to teach them to think in such "good/evil" terms. Most people who make your life miserable aren't being spiteful or evil; they're just not thinking about the consequences of their actions, or they have some other thing that's more important to them than your happiness. He didn't rip you off to make you unhappy; he ripped you off because he needs to put food on his kids' plates, and the loan collectors came by again last night. In movies for grown ups, I don't mind bad guys -- grown-ups have enough life experience to know this is fiction, while that over there is reality, and let's be honest -- a good bad guy makes a good movie, especially (mostly) in action films. (That's why Spiderman 2 was better than Spiderman 3, Batman 1 was better than Batman 4, why Hook was so much fun and Superman Returns was so lame. In each of those movies, the measure of the villain is the measure of the movie (to some extent). For a case in point, just look at which James Bond movies are memorable, and which ones are just limp. Everything else from one movie to the next is the same (other than the inventiveness of the chase scenes), so the villain is really the measure of the movie.) But with kids' movies. . . first of all, villains scare kids. Second of all, does it really help Billy to start thinking of Tommy in third grade as a villain, who's evil, and whom he must therefore vanquish (rather than just trying to make peace)? I don't think so.

That's why, especially for children's movies and stories, I really, really respect and admire the ones that have no bad guys. To me, Winnie the Pooh is the best example of this. Every character in Winnie the Pooh is unique, they're all friends, they usually get along, and they sometimes clash. The conflicts come out of their respective personalities -- Piglet gets scared on a windy night, Rabbit doesn't want to share his food with Pooh, Owl's tree blows down, Eeyore lost his tail, Piglet discovers a new game. There's no "snatcher" who comes out of the woods and kidnaps one of them from time to time, they just act like normal groups of friends in normal situations, like the ones their readers (kids) experience.

Well, I have another one.

Everybody, if you get the chance get your hands on Hayao Miyazaki's movie "My Neighbour Totoro" (Tonari no Totoro). Miyazaki is one of the best animators working right now -- his drawings and style and animation quality, as well as his sheer storytelling inventiveness and sense of wonder, all set wonderful standards for Japanese animation. Add to that the fact his stories are actually ABOUT stuff, rather than just being "evil alien robots (that are really well animated) invade earth, so humans have to invent new (really cool-looking) fighting styles, and wear (really neat) robot suits, to defeat them in really nifty fighting sequences with amazing explosions and dialogue shouted over kewl sound effects". A major theme in Princess Mononke was exploitation of the environment (rather than just cool mecha robot suits and schoolgirls in impossibly short skirts, common themes in some anime movies). All his movies are suitable for kids, though there are senses of whimsy and mystery that might be haunting, in the same way the book "Where the wild things are" haunted me, and stuck in my mind, when I was little.

The movie begins with a father and his two daughters moving into a quiet country house, a more relaxed place, where the girls can be a little more at ease than in the city. They need to do this because their mother is sick. She is in the hospital, with some unspecified but worrisome sickness that means she can't be with her daughters, and requires a lot of bedrest.

***spoiler warning*** I'm about to give away plot details, so if knowing a movie's plot points ruins the watching experience for you, then skip to the spot where it says ***spoiler warning over***

The younger sister wanders off one day and meets Totoro, a big, behemoth-sized creature of the woods, who happens to have magical powers. He has a huge, terrifyingly large mouth, but the teeth of an herbivore and a cute smile. He's a gentle, content monster, who often seems to smile like a Buddha. The little girl's first reaction, rather than abject terror at seeing this sleeping beast (we first meet him when he's asleep) is to fall asleep herself, right on his chest. Implicit trust.

The older sister meets him too, and, while they don't really have adventures per se, they have encounters with him that show he has a funny, quirky way, he has a few magical friends, and, most of all, he's looking out for them. During these girls' missing mother anxiety, a magical woodland beast happens to show up, to make them feel a little safer again.

The climax of the story, rather than being about a bully, a monster or some other such antagonist, comes with a letter from their mother's hospital, which brings the girls' anxiety about their missing mother to a head.

***spoiler warning over***

In all the situations, especially in the crisis at the end, both the girls' reactions are totally true to life, and show the storyteller's deep compassion for their anxiety, and the way Totoro and his magical friend resolve the crisis is sweet, gentle, and heart-breakingly true.

Sure, in part it's because I saw my own mother sick, so I intimately know and understand the anxiety these girls feel, but the ending, quite frankly, had me in a puddle, sobbing at the purity of the girls' love and concern for their mom. It's amazing that a filmmaker could catch such a primal emotion and strike right to the heart of it, in such a simple resolution.

And I thought, why ISN'T a child's love for its mother enough to be the main dramatic impetus for a movie? Why DON'T we see movies like this more often? That connection is so profound and deep, how shallow is it that we prefer watching a movie about some guys planning to rob a casino, where the main emotion and impulse is greed, rather than seeing tender films like this more often? How often are movies made about greed, revenge, or sheer survival, rather than being about love, loyalty, or commitment? Even when there's a "worthy cause" movie like Braveheart, where everybody's fighting for (let's all say it together) FREEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!, they have to add his own, lower (clicheed) impulse (revenge: they killed his wife), and make it personal. (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Braveheart? Another post. Another post.) Sure, there's nothing heroic or superhuman about the emotional journey these girls go through in "My Neighbour Totoro", but dammit, it's TRUE. The superhuman stuff highlights the human stuff, and draws it into sharper focus, rather than subsuming or even replacing it. The other problem, I suppose, is that it's so easy to take those emotions -- love, commitment, loyalty, dedication, doing right, redemption, etc., and make something sentimental and tawdry and manipulative with them, which sells real life short just as much as an oversimplified good guy/bad guy matrix.


Here's my favourite minute and a half in any animated film, ever. It perfectly shows Totoro's character, and the way he enjoys his life, and it made me think that Miyazaki must be a poet, to notice something like this, and then to put it into his movie.




He's roaring in delight. If you can find another ninety second clip that shows innocence and joy that purely, I wanna see it.

I'd rather read a book like that, I'd rather watch a movie like that. . .

Movies and books that are about those kinds of topics, that are compassionate and also true, that don't sell short their subjects, that respect their characters, that never lapse into sentimentality:

The Little Prince
A Complicated Kindness
Finding Nemo
Marvin's Room
again, Casablanca
(for its other flaws) Changing Lanes (with Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson)


(if you look carefully enough)
Magnolia
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf -- ugly behaviour, but there are diamonds in that mud!
again

(even Jonathan Livingston Seagull let me down at the end, by becoming too mystical, and losing its moorings)

Please tell me: what else should I be reading or seeing?

Getting old and staying young

I've completely forgotten all the reasons I gave for not going out dancing every weekend (yes, this may just be the afterglow, but so what if it is?)

DJ -- house, trance, d'n'b (drum and bass) -- these are instrumental styles of music built on recorded bits of music -- a rhythm, an instrument noise, played and layered on top of each other, to create (as one sub-genre is named,) a trance-like state. A good DJ doesn't so much perform, as creates a space where dancers can cut loose, and then pokes and prods that space, through shifts in dynamics and sounds, to raise the crowd into a completely different place. After a whole night of this, the sheer sense of community, of having danced myself silly for four or six or eight hours, of having poured sweat with these other people, creates a sense of community among the dancers who remain as the party wears on. Everybody is your friend. The whole world is a beautiful place. Music is enough.

There's something wonderful about really dancing with abandon. For a cerebral fella like myself, who thinks everything to death and then some, to do something so physical is a return to my senses, to my body, like exercise or yoga, it re-balances me. This, of course, is quite healthy. I'm glad I went: I almost didn't. I've had a few other nights recently where I've thought, "Hey, I should go dancing," and then thought, "Oh, it'll be so crowded," or "I never make new friends when I go dancing anyway; why should I bother?" or some other excuse, but the fact is, once I'm actually out there dancing, if I'm actually there just to dance, the rest of the world backs off pretty quick. As soon as my heart-rate goes up, really.

As we get older, it seems many/most of us become less inclined to go out and jump into some new experience. Sure, sometimes those things are uncomfortable. . . but are they actually uncomfortable, or just unfamiliar?

Young people accuse old people of being too conservative, of never trying new things, of thinking too readily in the set forms. At what age, at what point, do our minds close, and is that a natural/almost inevitable part of growing old, or is it a choice we each make? I don't think it happens at one clear watershed moment -- or some people would be sharp enough, and sensitive enough, to realise, "this is the point where I choose to continue learning new things, or choose to stay in my groove until it becomes a rut", and choose new, adventurous paths. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote, "Cowards die many times before their deaths" -- each time he chooses the easy way instead of the path of right, or the path of greatness. Might growing old be like that too? Is it those thousand little deaths, those thousand little "no"'s piled up on top of each other, until leaning into the familiar and shunning the unknown/uncomfortable becomes part of our nature? Is there anything wrong with that, or is that another (negative) way of describing the natural process of putting down roots?

On the other hand, part of it is our responsibilities. It's harder to go out and dance all night if one is committed to a 10am Men's breakfast, or church attendance, or family Saturdays. As your life gets more involved, more rooted, one must make cancellations, if one would do something spontaneous. And let's be honest -- some people go have adventures because their friends are, rather than because of any open-mindedness on their own part.

Might it be that we forget to break routine, that it simply stops occurring to us?

I don't know. Anyway, I've been thinking about what it means to grow up, the difference between growing up and growing old, and such things, lately, as I've met people who have told me I'm young-hearted, and other variations on that theme. It seems that usually when I'm called young-hearted, it's closely connected with my willingness to try new things, or to try and understand things on their own terms, rather than trying to force my own filters of understanding on them. Among the people I've spoken with, there seems to be some kind of implicit assumption that one of the divisions between youth and age is some kind of . . . I hate to say shutting of the mind, so let's say some kind of entrenchment in ones' own ways. Of course, this entrenchment can be caused by a lot of different things -- I think often it's dictated by the requirements of one's commitments -- the schedule required by work, by family, etc., that leads people to becoming "responsible adults". Sometimes the main determiner is sheer physical health, or budget -- some people stop drinking heavily simply because their bodies start taking three days to recover from one night on the town, or because they need to make their car payments.

I'd be interested to hear what some of you (my lovely readers) think about this. What do YOU think is the difference between growing up and growing old, and, especially, what changes inside a person when they become an "adult" -- is it something external, or internal, or a combination, or is it another of those frustrating things that's totally different for every person alive? (Probably, eh?)

(For a really beautiful insight on growing up, watch the movie "Finding Neverland", one of the most touching, tender movies about growing up and staying young I've seen. It's so compassionate toward its characters, the movie loves its characters, which makes YOU love them, too. It's really wonderful.)

By the way: here are some of the movies I've seen that have made me love or care about their characters recently. They also double as some of my favourite movies of the last five years. (Go figure.) In my world, if you don't have compassion, why are you writing a screenplay, book, play, etc.?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- the truest look at how people love each other, and hurt the ones they love the most, I've seen. Might be the wisest love story ever to come out of Hollywood.
Million Dollar Baby
Finding Neverland
Leaving Las Vegas (so so sad, but also so respectful of both main characters.)

Going back a bit, you just gotta see Casablanca. Really.


k. love you all

later

rob


(addendum:) I read a few comments on this blog, and I want to add. . . how terribly judgemental I sound here! I've thought again about what I said there, about those thousand little deaths, the thousand little no's -- there is much more than that. Maybe there's a difference between closing one's mind, and simply choosing to focus one's mind in a chosen direction. There must be. Some people choose "no" -- they choose to stay in a rut, rather than working to improve their lives. However, I think some people also simply commit to the choices they've already made, and by doing that, they open up new channels that can't be opened if you don't commit to them.

For example: marriage. If looked at one way, it's a way of saying "no" to every other potential mate in the world. How terribly narrow-minded! Why would anyone ever do that? Yet in another way, it's a way of saying "Yes!" to a future with a single person. The options and possiblities that can open up when one commits to that kind of future, are amazing, and beautiful, and praiseworthy. So maybe, a person isn't so much saying "no" to some kinds of new experiences, as saying "yes" to deepening and committing to another kind of experience. That's another kind of growing old/growing up, but it's good, as long as one doesn't start insisting others follow the same path, and judging others who choose a different way (that's where crotchety old men/women come from. . . maybe). Some people choose a path, and grow. Some people choose a path, and grow old. Maybe you don't really grow OLD until you've stopped growing on the path you've chosen. . . and I bet you start growing old much faster if you start regretting that chosen path, but do nothing to change your outlook.

There. Is that a more even-handed, less "young-and-single"-centric view of growing old?