In 2018 I wrote that “Life is a collection of feeling woozy in various places.” In 2023, I found out I was just iron deficient.
Despite the medical diagnosis and the (fortunately) very simple solution of taking one iron pill a day, it was a poetic attempt to sum up the entirety of this world, this life, this goodness and this beauty. And I mean all of it…all of the beauty and vibrance all around you which most of us don’t even notice.
We walk right by it, numbed to the wonder like a security guard at the Louvre.
I’m still trying to find one sentence — or maybe a paragraph — that sums up life, and perhaps there is not one. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s not. And that’s why we’ve never managed to exhaust the endless combinations of words and sentences and stories and descriptions. How many adjectives can we pair up with all the nouns that exist? And then to make them verb.
Sometimes I get angry at my own inability to sum up reality in words.
In my 8th book, I wrote that ‘language hovers above reality like a cloud above the earth.’ It doesn’t participate, it merely hovers nearby.
And the more I write, especially on days I get frustrated with the smallness of words, I find that to be true.
Even the big words are small.
Even on my iron pills I occasionally feel woozy.
Something about the orb we’re all stuck to soaring through the vast nothingness at a billion miles per hour.
And that’s another thing. They say the earth soars through space at like 7,000 miles per hour, but, compared to what? When you zoom out enough, those sorts of measurements would lose meaning. Because, we may be going that fast around our sun, but how fast is our galaxy soaring around other galaxies? Is there a center of the universe around which it all orbits? And how fast are we whipping around that?
When attempting to sum up the totality of life, do we start with the micro or the macro? The subjective or taking a stab at the objective? And if the latter, where would you begin?
That’s really what I attempted to do in that book, but that’s also why it’s called part 1: because there are infinite parts, are there not?
If you’ve successfully summed up life in a sentence, let me know.
Until then, I’ll keep traveling and experiencing and waking up and soaking it all in while I’m here, before I become larger…Because there’s no way you die and then become smaller.
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Day 52 of 100 Days of Blog
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