the act of running brings me closer to myself than anything else i do throughout the day. it is in that time that i feel most alive and am able to observe the world as closely as i was able to experience it when i was traveling.
as the leaves twist and turn in the breeze, making their descent to the cool, damp grass i am finally able to feel that it is indeed autumn and that the natural world is shifting, preparing for the change to come. my understanding of time changed as i traveled through countries and cultures that measure, follow and play with "time" in ways i had never considered. upon return i struggle to comprehend that 5 months have passed, that i missed the summer and all the activities that come with it. i intellectually understand that time has passed, that i had missed out on aspects of people's lives, and yet it all feels the same. or at least strangely familiar.
i wonder if the sense of familiarity is false. is everything around me the same and i am what is unfamiliar? traveling through other countries it was obvious i did not belong and all things were new to me, i was the outsider; unfamiliarity (is that even a word?) was normal. here in my own country i have never felt i fit in but i was comfortable with that, because it was a part of my identity, an aspect of who i was and thus it was familiar. i know how to function in this western world, where to go to purchase a long sleeve shirt, how to find the nearest bank and how to interact with the barista at the coffee shop...but i have forgotten how to say things in English, my heart races as i walk into grocery store and i wonder how to respond in many conversations. i suppose it is not that i do not know things or at least how to do things so much as i second guess myself now. at times i wonder, am i doing or saying it this way because i used to, because it is the best way or because it is something i picked up the last few months?
it is easy here. ok yes of course life can have it´s challenges and horrible things happen, i am not saying that everything is perfect here. what i mean to say is, one could move through life without feeling that they are LIVING. rather one could go through life as if on a conveyor belt, on a continuous, monotonous loop. i am struggling here to find a coherent way to express this thought and the best i can do is say this: there are so many ways in the Western world to distract and distance oneself from people, events, emotions and thoughts; is that living?
...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don´t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
it is with this in mind that i continue on a few more steps, gasping for cool air and the sight of a blue bird soaring among the trees.
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