The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I think I need to go back and read 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' which I think was probably a bit heavy for me when I read it the summer after freshman year. I enjoyed it then, but I think its "weight" totally escaped me. But lately, as I try to wrap my mind around all that has happened over the past year and attempt to use language to express everything I felt and experienced - either verbally or through my writing - it all seems utterly futile.

In so many ways it is as if nothing has changed since I first left nearly one year ago: Except Me. Things look the same, people act the same, food tastes the same, but me, I've got a new history of events, relationships and emotions that are now entwined with my very being. But what do I have to show for all of this besides a head full of memories and a computer full of digital photos? Experiences are fleeting, emotions are temporary and relationships are inevitably changed when you go from living with a person to monthly email exchanges.

How then do I proceed from here? I want to tell everyone each and every detail of each and every moment of my journey, but as soon as I try I hit a wall. Actually, it's more of a double edged sword: either I'm struck with the feeling that people just don't care, don't want to take the time to learn about the details of each picture, and wouldn't understand anyways, or I'm completely incapable of transforming these memories into language. It seems as if after a year of travel the most I have to show for it besides the pictures is this feeling in the pit of my stomach that I just lived a tremendous dream (or is that just indigestion?).

To you, dear reader, this probably seems utterly somber and depressing, but really it isn't. I know that in a more existential and less tangible sense that this experience was something extraordinary that will undoubtedly shape my future both in terms of what I do with my life and the numerous relationships I have developed around the globe. But the very fact that my experiences were all in foreign lands now makes them seem even more foreign, so much so that I keep saying "last year" in reference to senior year, as if this whole past year really was just some weird dream, after which I woke up to the very same life I was living before I left, but with some eerie feeling that it really did occur.

It is both a blessing and a curse that the Watson Foundation holds us accountable for so little at the end of our fellowship: 5 pages double spaced. Five pages double spaced!! How do I possible capture all that I want to convey in five pages? But even with that problem, how do I even begin to write it all down when at this point it still seems like pure emotion and thus every time I attempt to write I start to cry?

I guess I have to go back to Eliot on this one, who said that words fail, but ultimately, it is all in the trying. So I'll keep blogging, journaling, working towards my book and final report and eventually I'll find something at least close to the right words.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure.

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate—but there is no competition—

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

-From "Four Quartets" by TS Eliot

Funny how TS had the same problem with not being able to put into new words what the great writers before him already said, but in dealing with his problem, actually said it so well that his words are what I turn to. No?

(I know...I am an Uber Dork.) cheers.