Road Diary 29/11/22 - Vancouver, BC
The opening scenes of your life are mere flashes and nothingness by the time you’re reflecting on what it means to have had a beginning. By the time you’re conscious of it, already here, somewhere in the middle, caught up in the perpetual moment of self-awareness. Awareness that being in this moment, right here and now, with whatever is in front of you and whatever is pressing against your legs in your pockets, is all you have and all you are.
The self holds a glimmer of infinite possibilities for futures, contained in plans and predictions and shopping lists. All the little things you can fathom you might become. All the places you think you might go. And all that possibility, just that, possibility. Intangible. Mere figments of the imagination and nothing guaranteed no matter how big a deposit you put down.
The self also holds onto fragments of who you think you were before now. Photographs, key chains and childhood memories. Each time something is recalled, rewritten as fiction. The trace fading like a dream the moment you try to grasp a detail. The very act of trying to tether yourself to more than this moment, seeding doubt.
Everything outside of here is in your head, and yet you spend so little time here, appreciating the weight of that hair caught in your eyelash, or the glance of sunlight stretching across the room and hitting your chest. The heat in your right shoulder where it slices you in two.
You spend so much time planning how to get somewhere a year or two away, where you imagine you have achieved something beyond what you have today, and where you will feel more deserving of existing in the here-ness of a moment than you do right now. As though presence is something attainable through a to do list. As though hereness could possibly be more attainable there. As though contentment is a mountain to climb or an income to earn and not just today, on a bus somewhere next to a kid in a red coat, or at a desk in a sunray, cut in half by it, glowing, like the moment that is, and all your existence right at the seam, in the shear of the light where it slices.
