Saturday, March 10, 2007

Packing, Rushing and Stuff


In a few minutes we leave for Roma. There are so many things to do so we can leave for a few weeks.

And I think about what we leave behind, and how we manage without those things. I'm looking at a glass jar filled with a multitude of pencils and scissors. Then to my right, as my eyes pass over a computer printer, I see a bookshelf with six shelves of books. And the list goes on and on.

I never really believed that history was real until I went to Florence and stood in the footsteps of Leonardo. Events really did happen in the past, even if post-modernists minimize these events by allowing different readings of them.

One of my original thoughts was to have this blog be a diary, or "diaristic notations," as I once titled a course I taught. But no, I'm going to resist that because where I am in time or place is being a slave of the present. The Buddhist (given my sophomoric understanding) attempts to be here now (mindfulness). A good alternative would be to be everywhere at all times. To go to the Colosseum and watch the lion fights. To close my eyes in the airplane and fly to the closest inhabited planet.

It is not right that we invent time (and space?) and then we are bound by it's confines. Being human should be to have the ability to connect past, present, and future so that we are in all places at all times all at once.

A little challenge for the imagination.