You ask me how I can be gone so long. How I can justify my lack of connection. Doesn’t my family miss me? Don’t I want to go back?
In my head, I ask you how you can stay away from the world so long. How can you justify not seeking what’s there for us to discover? Don’t you want to go out into the libraries that are around every corner? All those people to meet. Aren’t THEY going to miss you?
But I don’t, because that’s not my place to tell you. We all get to decide these things. Your questions are just as inappropriate, but somehow more acceptable.
I watched a TED lecture today, where Alain de Botton talked about success. He said that when aiming to succeed, you have to plan on what’s going to lack, too. Because you can’t have everything. And we just choose different things.
The difference between us is not that I don’t care. Not that I don’t miss things that I love. I do miss things, and it sucks.
But you miss things too.
I miss what I do not have right now; you miss what has passed you by entirely. And I have decided that I would so much rather the former.
I miss what I have loved, to love more. What I know, to know more. What I understand, to understand more.
You miss what you have yet to love, to stay close to the love you have. What you have yet to know for what you are comfortable knowing. What you have yet to understand for what you do understand.
It’s a different kind of missing, but it doesn’t make you any more attached than I am. It might make me restless. But I am hungry to know and to understand and to love all those things that I’m missing all the more for every new discovery. For all that I seek to know, there is always something else. Something missed. I’ll never know it all, but I begin. You can never know the things you are missing.
A bit of a new genre for me… but it’s the college campus version of wedding reception experience, right? :)
My cousin once described my grandparents’ Arkansas farm to me as “a living place; not a doing place.” And I love farms for that. That’s not to say there’s nothing to do, but there’s a charm in that sort of self-contained life. There’s always work to be done, but there aren’t tons of obvious options for stimulation otherwise. But I don’t believe in boredom, and the thrill of farms and open space cater to that sense of exploration.
And they’re comforting places. Like when you’re totally enclosed in a car and the world is flying around outside, and you feel like you might as well be in a submarine, deep under water in a totally foreign and dangerous world, for the way that car just holds everything you need to dart from place to place. Everything is just so safe and embraced.
I’m speaking very generally here. Of course, no two places are the same, farm or not, but there are certain familiarities. The talk of “going into town,” the smell of the well-water that comes out of the faucets, the bumpy roads…
Oh yeah, and cats. A whole lotta cats.
It was a lovely Easter.
And there is still another half a roll that I need to finish shooting (that’s what happened with spring break, too, thus the delay…)
Home/the place I grew up/where my parents live. Regardless, it was week full of craziness and touring and late night driving and horses and family and phototakings.
The place becomes more and more emotionally complicated the more I’m away.
