Nomad's Pub

Ramblings of a Nomad...

Silence; I sit alone in the room--completely separate from the strangers typing away at computers on either side of me.

Sometimes you wonder what all life is about. Everything seems so pointless or confusing and we never quite manage to understand what goes on, or why. We hurt; we ache; we cry or refuse to cry. Those of us frightened enough run. Those of us strong enough run. In the end, we all run, yet somehow, we never can quite escape.

That's why we kill ourselves.

How else are we to escape from ourselve? From our lives?

Sure, there are other reasons for suicide, but this is at least among them.

Greatly among them.

I've been thinking a lot about life and being and time... Here I am, travelling around the world. It's been six months now, and I'm still going steady. Country to country, place to place. Six months of suitcase living. How delightful... How wearisome.

Sometimes I wonder why am I doing all this, and what is the point? Am I running from something? To something? What?

There has been a lot of discontent in my life; a lot of struggle. So also in the lives of so many of those whom I am very glad to know.

Something I read several days ago, while passing through an airport, actually, caught my eye and directed me to a passage in Ecclesiastes. (This, aside from the "time for everything" passage, has not been much frequented by me...) And I want to share this as I continue to think about it, because I cannot shake it from my thoughts...

"I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil." ~Ecclesiastes 3: 10-13, NRSV.

Now, this is something written by King Solomon, the wisest king ever to reign in Jerusalem and the son of King David. And it struck me so much that I'm now really looking again at the whole book. It's so nice to know that I'm not the only one who thinks like this; who looks at life and thinks how pointless everything is even when I have people telling me time and again how wonderful and rich (etc, etc) my life is. Because I look at it, and I look at other people, and I don't understand anything at all, and it all seems in the end, as King Solomon says so repeatedly in the chapter, to be such vanity. So pointless.

But then he says, despite all of this pointlessness... that our life day by day is something that we are able to take pleasure in. Here I spend so much of my time trying to figure out or understand what my life means or what is its point...and end up missing the joy of it. And this joy is a gift. It is not something that I should have to earn particularly, or something that comes and goes...but a constant; a given. A gift.

So here I am... sitting away typing... not having a clue how all my countries and cultures fit together when many times all they seem to do is war inside me... and smiling... because I'm starting to see that I'm the one making them war. I'm the one trying to do all the meshing. I'm the one trying to do...well, everything. I want to know, and to understand.

But I can't.

So why can I--can we--not sit back and enjoy the things that we are given... "the lot set before us," and be joyful anyways because we ARE?

I am. That is a present condition. We do not say "I was," nor "I will be," but "I am." That is the defining of ourselves.

Who am I, when all the extra stuff about me is blown off? When my likes and dislikes are discarded; when my emotions are removed; when culture is irrelevant; when there is nothing but the core being of me left?

I do not think that my being will be revealed with careful scrutiny or self examination... That will only be followed by self censuring and more self censuring and one day, I will be so censured that I will no longer be...me.

Who am I? It comes out in a laugh or a tear; in the arms of a friend or the hands of an enemy. It emerges ever clearer the more I embrace the goodness of life... If a painter sits and wonders what he is painting, the canvas remains blank. If he just begins to paint, the picture emgerges...

This is going to be an unsatisfactory post; I think it must be quite random sounding and it is not really finished yet. I have many more questions and many more thoughts, but I cannot quite reach that deep into my mind right now to retrieve them. But they will surface, and this will be continued another time.

But for now... Now I have the wedding of a friend in but a few days and another a week after that. I have meetings with professors whom I have not seen in six months. I have coffee appointments with friends I have so much to catch up and share with. I get to go swimming and enjoy a natural defiance of gravity. I have tan lines to get rid of and books to read and work to do in the office and the sky is blue and the sun is warm and the nature calls my name.

It is good to be able to go home wherever I go.

I am glad to be a nomad.

posted by Lada @ 6:08 PM