Daytime stars

The assistant dean set his tea on the table and sighed, “I think I’m getting old. I don’t understand why they’re so critical,” referring to a mindset in Chinese youth that, in his mind, could be compared to the counter-culture in the West a half century ago. THAT comparison is worth unpacking, but his comment resonated with me for another reason, simply his feeling apart. He isn’t old, but he misses something. He no longer finds in the world around him something about a world he had known and loved.

In my case, it’s not that I don’t love the world I’m in—and that I don’t feel deeply connected to my beloveds at home. I feel new growth since the trauma of 2008. I no longer feel hopeless, on the outer edge of sanity. Even here in Beibei, far from home, there’s so much to savor and enjoy. I like it here. I’m happy. But. My existence is still radically altered—it’s somehow not the world I knew.

I don’t quite understand it. So it’s this I’ve come to wrestle with. So it’s not the world I knew? So what is here in this “other” world, one that was unknown to a younger me? What doors might I open here? What might I find here in this “other” place that the very sunniness of my previous existence blinded me to? What daytime stars didn’t I see—that maybe now I can?

Can I turn the not-ness of the moment—it’s not the pre-lapsarian world I once knew—into presence?

I think I can—with intention, with desire, with a little mind over matter. But I’m waiting for the feeling to catch up, the feeling of being fully human, fully alive, fully present.

www.space.com


With debts to Wendell Berry