I woke up this morning frustrated. I listened to the woman next door filling up water buckets and pouring them out into other buckets. Laundry, no doubt. I thought about the dinner I ate last night, cooked by the lone woman staying in the house I’m in. The movies – lots -- I’ve watched over the past few days, practically in a vegetable state. The fact that the most impressive thing I’ve done is fetch two avocadoes from a tree, with the husband of the wife who works, cleans and cooks, watching. It may be guilt, all of this, but it may be that I’m slowly being reborn.
Before I left, I took simple pleasures from my life piecemeal, and replaced them with more responsible ones. I did all this before knowing why I was doing it. When I arrived in Mozambique, I was in some of the best mental and physical shape of my life. It felt wonderful. I still look back to the middle of 2002 and seek that same peacefulness.
Because the last two years has temporarily ruined me. But it’s not due to any vice I have – it’s because I never quite eradicated all the vices I had. I never knew why I was doing it in the first place! And I missed some of the mental issues – like, looking to movies and television for escape (of course, only when necessary – you must understand my sarcasm here) and so when my mental pipes get blocked up, I look for the easy out. And after two years of an experience – er, of life! --- that I’m still trying to get my mind around, the mental pipes were blocked up.
And so I need to remove and artificial barriers (“I never want to work in computers again,” “I will never eat U.S. meat again,” “I must have a noble job”) before I can get my mind around it. When one uses never and must, one is saying that some part of life is intrinsically immutable – which isn’t right. Everything changes. I change every day. I have changed since I started writing this entry. So limiting that change, handcuffing it, produces conflict in life. When change happens internally, without being manifested externally, and you deny that change, there is a twisting and turning that stops you in your tracks.
And then it all falls down. If I say to not have any hard and fast rules to how I live, and it changes all the time, how can I ever know what I think?
Reset.
Banana and bread sandwich. Wheat bread. Fresh banana, from where bananas come from. The pen moving along the paper. Crow in the sky. Water boiling. Kids playing. Dishes rattling. Person scuffling. Silence in between. The silence occupies more space than any one of these things, like poorly used packing material. Poorly used, because packing material, unlike silence, should be sparingly used.
Peace,
John
