May 19, 2012

• The ghosts in the photographs

  I find every conversation, every time I’m with someone, to be a very meaningful experience. There is something so deep about it.

  When you watch a movie and you see an early scene, it doesn’t really mean much. But as the characters go to scene after scene you see them stretching and taking flight from that earlier scene, and on and on it grows into something complex and beautiful. By the end that earlier scene seems to have had so much waiting in it, so many hopes and dreams latent in it.

  You can keep your past constant or change it based on what you do in the present. When you walk the same way to work again today, you are keeping your past self constant that says ‘I always walk the same way to work’. If you move cities for the first time, you start to see your past life as one that had been waiting to move, that wasn’t settled down in a given spot. You suddenly realize the arc your life had all along, based on what you’re doing.

  You can’t tell people about your past, because you don’t even know it yet.

  ‘Your life is what you try to do’ I told myself as I walked around the first floor of my house. I called Starbucks and they were open until 10:30. I went upstairs and asked my mom if she wanted to get some coffee. We never go out for coffee.

  It was dark overhead as we walked out after it closed, but there was a commercial glow from the buildings all around us. The humming of the highway echoed in the distance. My mom sees this as the place where she moved to, I see it as the place where I came from. This road of businesses is the one we all would come to in high school, when we had no idea what was waiting for us out in the world. As I got in the car I felt sad that there were so many lights.

  I was in a thrift store looking at books earlier in the day. It’s just nice to see a book and know you’ll never read it. One book was about the war in Iraq and how the military had made a mess of everything. But it was written years ago, and so much has happened in Iraq since then. That made me think about stories, and how it is up to humans when to start and stop them. Did it make sense to stop the story then? When you think about it, doesn’t it seem like there are an infinite amount of stories?

  We think of ourselves as different people than we actually are. What you want to do is not the same thing as what you are willing to do. The only things you know you’re actually willing to do are the things that you do. Every other thing you think of doing might just be a part of who you imagine yourself to be, and have nothing to do with who you actually are.

  I lose track of things, in my head. I know I’m not remembering much from these days. There are moments, hidden pockets lost in time, when God breaks my heart and I see how little everything matters next to him and his children. The rest of the time my head is in the world, and I can’t see much at all.

  All of these things build up into each moment you experience. When you are with someone it connects to their future and their past, to all the stories that are going on with them, in subtle and undetectable ways. To be with someone shows you are willing to say ‘yes’ to their presence. Then as you talk every thing you say changes things a little bit from the way they were before. This overwhelming reality floods every moment and all I can think is ‘wow’ when I’m with someone. It is a deep moment that connects in uncountable ways to everything else there is.

  But we pretend none of this is going on, that things don’t have that much importance, that it’s not crazy that there’s this huge complicated physical reality of houses and trees and stars and people. We pretend in order to numb ourselves, so that we can keep going without the emotion of shock blocking everything else out; but still, this emotion, ever potent, ever present, locks itself deep into the heart of things.

  • 3:37 am
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