Life and Motion

I have two arduous projects underway. I've already mentioned in an earlier post that one of them is to write a novel. The other is to run a marathon.

To my surprise, I've been training regularly. One of the unexpected benefits of that is that I get lots of time to listen to music while I run. That's given me the opportunity to rediscover some truly brilliant lyrics. The one I came accross this morning was from Dreamline, by Rush:

We are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Knowing that we're only immortal for a limited time

There was something eerily appropriate about the fact that I listened to this today, just a couple of hours after landing in Rio de Janeiro, five thousand miles away from home. It's my third visit to Brazil. The first one was back in 2008, and it taught me about living in the moment. The second one was in May this year, and that one taught me that every single day can bring a delightful surprise - you just have to be ready to embrace it. I wonder what I will learn this week.

I've already had my first unusual conversation of this trip, and that was while I was still in the US. I was eating dinner while waiting for my connecting flight. Tyler, the waiter who was serving me, noticed I was reading a book about human intelligence. He asked to read the back cover and saw that it made mention of dreams and myths. For some reason that reminded him of the spiritual journey that he was on. He told me that his wife had just bought him a very similar book as a present for their anniversary, which was on the following day

To appreciate the unexpectedness of that statement, you need to know what Tyler looks like. He is thin as a rake. He has a sparse billy-goat growth of thin curls on his chin. He speaks with the confident earnestness of someone who has never had a difficult conversation with a policeman. He doesn't look a day older than seventeen. I could accept that even at a tender age he had spiritual yearnings. But there is no way he is old enough to be legally married.

Nevertheless, I hid my disbelief and encouraged him to tell me more. He recommended a site called www.nohoax.com. Obviously, with a name like that I was intensely suspicious and looked it up immediately. I was not disappointed. The site is run by a a guy called George Green who claims that God was the leader of an extra-terrestrial race and that more recently the aliens contacted George himself to get him to spread their message. I tried to read what that message was, and swiftly concluded it was just page after page of polysyllabic rambling.

I guess spirituality is like ice cream. It comes in many flavors and we are all entitled to choose the one that comforts us best. I can judge George Green - in fact I already have. But it's not for me to judge Tyler's willingness to hear what Green has to say. I don't understand why, but Green's ideas help Tyler feel connected with his world, they reassure him that there is more to life than collecting tips in an airport restaurant and they give his (probably illegal) wife a reason to buy him an anniversary present. So I have to concede that something good has happened.

It's part of the gift of human intelligence that we can search for ideas, we can try them on, we can live through them for as long as they work. And when they no longer improve our lives we can discard them and move on to new, richer, more fulfilling ideas. Maybe Tyler will follow Green's ideas for years. Or maybe he will move on to something new next week. But as long as he's thinking about what's around him, eventually he will move on. That's why it's a spiritual journey, not a quest. A journey continues, a quest eventually ends.

As long as we're searching for new ideas, we're still thinking. And as long as we're still thinking, we're still alive. Whether or not we travel from place to place we can still wander the face of our inner world, weighing the weight of our dreams. We may only be immortal for a limited time, but it's up to us to make that time last as long as we want it to. It only ends when the wandering stops.