Thoughts

Another week had almost come to an end and I am feeling troubled. I have never really experienced anything like this - a panicky feeling that time is rushing forward and I can't slow it down. I have been in Japan for over three months now and I can hardly believe it. As I sat in my classroom this afternoon and turned to the last page of my book "Hokkaido Highway Blues" I was overwhelmed by a sense of the fleeting nature of everything. We are constantly propelled forward in a state that exists only as the present moment. It is all we know but we never have time to really grasp it. I feel like life is slipping through my fingers like fine sand. Days and weeks are coming and going and I don't know what it is all for. I have come to no resolutions about anything. I feel settled in an utterly unsettled way. I have no family out here, I share nothing with my host nation with regard to history, language, social customs or attitudes. I feel isolated in the most hospitable way.

Yet I wonder what it is all for. Why is it so important to have experiences? To make one feel alive? I am having the experiences and I feel pretty alive - not as alive as I would if I were actually travelling Japan - residing in one place does not supply the same buzz. I feel like a collector. A collector of memorabilia - literally. I am obsessed with getting the most out of everything, as if at the end of it all, on my death bed, I will be content in the knowledge that I had extracted the very essence of life from every moment and thus could die satisfied. However, this struggle for more and more experience is actually an affliction. I am concerned that my desire for it casts a shadow over my experience of my present reality. I don't feel as if I am able to confront what it is I am a part of - not to the extent that I'd like to anyway.

I am concerned with recording as much as possible in writing and photography, as if by doing so I will preserve it all. Then at some point in the future, when I have time, I will be able to fully appreciate it. It is a depressing fact that everything is gone sooner or later. Everything comes to an end. Everything. As ephemeral as the life of a may-fly. You find yourself on a plane, full of anticipation, a long journey ahead, adventures are guaranteed, news sights are a certainty. It is the glorious feeling that grips the traveller. But as soon as a traveller stops he ceases to exist. In no time at all the adventures have been had and remain, at best, a few lines in a journal, or as a millisecond here or there imprinted onto film. The sights are now familiar, and have begun to decompose into fragmented memories.

It is my own mortality and impermanence that I believe I am having trouble coming to terms with. If only I could pause life when I wanted to and rewind months or years and relive past experiences. How many people have thought this very same thing I wonder? I am sure everyone has at some point. But why my concern with holding onto my personal history? I suppose because it is everything I am. If I lost my long term memory I would indeed have gained a zen like state in which to fully experience the present moment, but really I would be nothing - no one. The present moment would have very little significance if it were not for our pasts that trail behind us like vapour trails in a blue sky, right to the moment we were born. To deny ourselves our pasts is to cast aside all the many selves we have been and thus who we are now. We are simply the sum of our experiences....