Every day, on my unsteady walk to school, I walk past the
grave of my host-families father. He passed away two years ago from an illness
and the family has all but recovered.
Sometimes
we are fortunate enough to have a real experience, a deep moment in which we
feel truly alive. These instances are often derived from intense feeling; a
burst of great pain or sorrow, an instant of deep anger or regret; a moment of
careless love or vulnerability.
I feel like
in our innocuous 21st century lives, we don’t leave ourselves enough
time for raw emotion. We are just too busy with our work, our families, our
relationships, our hobbies, our telephones and our televisions and our
telenovellas. We love the idea of a
real moment, we can recognize them, yet we seldom experience them for
ourselves.
I’m a firm
believer in few subjects, yet I enjoy a little semiotics now and then. I am
also the first to admit that I seldom feel real. I have been in a few
situations in life: break-ups, fist fights, deaths etc, where I had absolutely
no idea how to behave. These occasions give you the opportunity to stop being a
walking billboard, finally find your spine or your soul (or your balls) and start
acting like a human being. What did I do in these moments? I recognized the
familiar pattern (domain) around me, the signifiers and the signified, and I
acted like the protagonist of the last goddamned movie I had happened to watch.
What a tool.
I would bet
that you, reading these words right now, have had a similar experience. Maybe
you didn’t act like Bogart in Casablanca (I certainly didn’t) but I’m sure you
felt awkward, I’m sure you couldn’t believe a lot of the words coming out of
your mouth, maybe you couldn’t even figure out what to do with your hands.
These moments suck.
The solution?
Practice.
Do whatever
you need to do to get yourself back in the saddle: love again, go fight a
bully, jump out of an airplane or some other cliché-ridden activity. The more
awkward situations you put yourself in, the more opportunities you have to
fight your way out of them. These moments define us, the memories of which keep
us going when the clouds start to form, the legacy of which makes us all the
more human.
I took a
chance, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I am a part of some noble
undertaking, but it was a chance nonetheless. Instead of stepping off an
airplane at 10 thousand feet, I stepped off an airplane and into a developing
country. Sometimes I think about the former, at least it wouldn’t have taken me
4 months to hit the ground, but that’s a different story.
When I see
that gravestone in the morning, when I see my host-mother clutching the
portrait of her late husband, when I witness that fleeting moment of agony, I
feel confounded and I feel awkward, but at least I feel real.
Apparently the mouse I saw this morning while
I was eating my breakfast khachapuri was a “family friend”. Oh yeah, those
special moments can come from laughter as well.
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