Ponderings.

I’m not sure what this blog is about. I wrote it a month or two ago and discovered it again recently. It seems worthy of posting though, if only to share an important piece of what goes on in my mind while I wonder and wander in the East.

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Yesterday I stood on the roof holding Ezra. It was about dusk, and for some reason there was none of the usual clatter coming from the road. It was just an ordinary moment when quietly a change came over me. My skin registered the feeling of the light breeze; my eyes took in the leaves of the rain tree dangling over me; my ears noticed the bird calls; and then I became aware of Ezra, still and listening and feeling too, taking in the coming evening with me. Then the words of a psalm came to mind:

“I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child is my soul with in me.”

And I thought, oh, this is beauty.

Though my blog never seems the appropriate place to talk about it, since I came to Bangladesh I have made a concerted effort to face pain and suffering. Part of the education that I have sought here was a deeper understanding and experience of these things. So I have paid attention to pain and suffering. I have thought about it, I have tried not to allow myself to ignore it, or soften it, pretending that the people I see living lives of constant deprivation are really not feeling so bad, pretending that the children I see begging on the street don’t mind. I am glad of all of this (if you can use the word “glad” for it), but this moment, as others earlier have, reminded me of one of the traps you can get caught in when choosing to see the dark side of life: I forgot the beauty. Truly when I looked around me it was like I hadn’t been in this place before. In seeing and believing in the scum of the earth, I became blind to the beauty.

Now reflecting on this experience, I wonder, how can I do both? Sometimes it seems to me that when I have eyes looking for the impoverished and oppressed (who are often invisible to those of us fortunate enough to be out of the group), I render myself unable pick up on the good. Like a hypochondriac who comes to see everything as a possible symptom of disease, I come to connect everything with darkness. But the opposite problem is so often true. I want to see things as beautiful. I don’t want to experience pain or believe in its existence, and so I reject or gloss over much of the dark reality around me.

I find it easier to skip both of these experiences actually; to walk through life seeing beauty and pain alike as a tourist. You see something pretty, snap a picture and go back home to tell about it. You see an abandoned man in a nursing home, a documentary about the children in Africa, and you hold a picture in your mind, shed a tear perhaps, store away the knowledge for your next intellectual conversation about humanitarian crisis in the world, and get back to life. This is what I do.

The real experience of either light or darkness I think is profound and often difficult to come to terms with. I think the truly wise people are those that learn how to accept both, those who find a way to walk through life with eyes wide open to beauty and pain, darkness and light, holding real joy in one hand with sorrow in the other.

But as for me, I am not yet so wise nor so strong though I seek to be; not yet so deep though I pretend to be. I throw up my hands and admit that I do not know how to deal with both. My mind and heart turn to putty in the face of it. The darkness is too dark, and the light too bright for me to look at them steadily. I just take quick glimpses.

I hope though. That’s what I do most of the time. I hope that I will learn. I hope that one day my words will mean something more than the grasping wonderings of a romantic mind. I hope that eventually my forced glimpses will turn into a holding gaze. A gaze that will give me the knowledge and wisdom to experience the moments of life in their totality, not pretending, imposing, or snapping pictures. I hope to live a life that enables me to give good gifts to others, gifts that can only come from one who is living in the truth.

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For a while I looked for a photo to go with this blog entry. After not being able to find one that seemed good for it, I re-read it and felt the irony of my quest. Of course there is no picture to go with a blog about not experiencing life in pictures… being human is such a paradox.