Somehow I'm always surprised that travel so consistently forces you to re-think and experience in first principles. Being snowed in, having plans and flights cancelled repeatedly, trying to manage classwork and (mostly self-imposed) social expectations with compounding sleep debt... fighting bitterness and depression resurfacing over petty comparisons, past mistakes, lost time... but having the space and time to work through it all and come out happier. It reminds me a lot of the winter youth retreats from years ago: the cold and the discomfort that seemed to contribute to the emotional purge I'd experience at the revival sermons, the afterglow that lasted all of two days when I got back. It turns out those two days were the actual vacation.
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| Shoveled friend's driveway for fun. Vacation never feels like vacation unless I do some work... |
There's always this turbulence between a nihilistic "life is meaningless and painful, so why do anything" and existentialist "life is meaningless but joyful, make meaning of it". I think it's that both are valid at different times. You can reframe pain all you want but there is no escaping it in that moment. Avoiding it dulls your capability to live, drags things out. Being stuck in your head prevents you from engaging with, experiencing, remembering the external world, but that struggle is necessary sometimes. You have to fully hold both sides as valid.
I was listening to this podcast today and the author (George Saunders) and Dua Lipa reflected on the absurd nature of death, and how he himself, despite struggling and failing to find peace with death in any consistent way, finds that it lends force to art -- the impermanence of those "sacramental" moments where through art, we become something more than our mundane selves, something more pure. Actually, I'd like to pass this idea to the limit and say that we die every second we are alive, each such "mundane" moment holding the same beauty. It's just that sometimes we are allowed (allow ourselves?) to bask in it when awareness aligns with the moment in a kind of flow state.
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