Fading

How many emotions and experiences I’ve had, where I’ve said “I will never forget this!”

In a moment of rapture it seems inconceivable that such a towering majesty of experience could one day be a shadow and seem to have left no imprint on my being.

Since my first experience in the refugee camp my outrage has faded. My sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the world has dissolved into a moment of hunger, meaningless joking, a newspaper article. My life is defined more now by friendships, my new animal friends (there is a cute little lizard who watches me while I shower, and I’ve come to find most bugs absolutely adorable.) It’s not that I surround myself with triviality to ignore the deeper truths—it’s that the deeper truths can fade away. I become terrified of my moments of indifference.

I revisited Ralph’s essay on Burning Man, which drew something like 18,000 viewers when I posted it on my blog. I remember how I first read that essay and cried with Ralph at how strange the world is that we don’t look each other in the eye. I remember how my friends who had not been to Burning Man didn’t really understand what the post was about. And reading it again now, I barely understand any more either.

I have moments of personal truth and they fade into nothingness. The only defense I’ve found that works is to write, and to seek ways to rediscover.