20080924

Missing something

The rain cycle is evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection before returning yet again to evaporation. As the Earth spins around the sun it creates spring, summer, fall, and winter before returning yet again to the spring.

However, the rain cycle is also precipitation, collection, evaporation, and condensation. The seasons can be summer, fall, winter, and spring. That's the point of a cycle, we choose where it begins and ends, as a cycle it has no ending, that's a quality we attribute to it to help us understand it.

Most people on this planet, they have at most one relationship that never ends. Relationship of the romantic kind. Otherwise they go through a cycle of meeting someone, dating them, caring for them, drifting apart, and going their separate ways before once again meeting someone. And, like all cycles, choosing to place the beginning at meeting someone, and the ending at going their separate ways, is something we attribute to the cycle. It makes as much sense as placing the beginning of the cycle at caring for someone, and the end with dating someone.

Some cycles though, are beyond the capacity of a human to fully grasp. Some cycles are longer than our lifespans. The carbon cycle involving the exchange of carbon between rocks and the Earth's surface takes over five hundred and fifty million years. It takes over four billion years for our galaxy to circle the nearest neighbouring galaxy. Some cycles are so long that to us humans, with our human lifespans, they don't look like cycles at all, they look like linear paths that go on forever.

Those first three paragraphs have been sitting in my files for years unposted. Written sometime after the end of my five and a half year relationship. They went unposted because they felt incomplete. Like they were missing something. That something, the fourth paragraph, has only come to me now.

20080908

Desire

The origin of suffering is desire. This is the second noble truth of Buddhism. The others being that life is suffering, that suffering can be avoided, and that the path to the ending of suffering is known.

This was the first time we met in person and our conversation ran to nearly every topic possible, as if we would never meet again and so needed to cover the entire breadth of who we were in this one night. There were compliments delivered in both directions, she said she liked me, and I said, "cht'aimes beaucoup." She assured me that that meant the same thing.

We spoke in French all night, except for the few times where I couldn't find my words. When it got cold sitting outside on the terrasse, I offered her my sweater, which she wore.

She identified herself as a geek. A feminist. An anarchist. Queer. She identified me as a Buddhist. I know this because she asked me if I was one.

We left the bar at closing time.

In the morning, we woke up early, I had to meet someone before they left for work, and she was going out of town for the weekend. I left her my number and a kiss. And then another, before leaving.

Since, I've thought of her, constantly would be an exaggeration, but what else can you call it when you babble about her to everyone you speak to?

20080902

Getting older

Once you get past a certain stage in life, your list of friends becomes pretty stable. Once out of school, you aren't meeting fifty new people a week, cherry picking the best of the lot to be best friends forever with.

So, you're out of school and doing your best to stay young. You're not starting a career. Getting married. Having kids. Placing a down payment on your first home. Opting for open variable interest rate mortgage payments. Working long hours to put something away for your future. There's no his and her toothbrushes in your life.

But they're doing all those things. They being those friends you picked when you were all young together. And, even if you're not growing up, they are, and you still feel like you're getting older.