This is the soundtrack for my life these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q&NR=1. Watch it. That's all I can say about it. It will change your life if you let it. I mean, it will work in concert with a bunch of other things to produce an actual change in your life if you are willing to put in the necessary commitment. That's actually my favorite thing about my current life in Japan. I love my job. I love my students and I love the growing and blossoming daily interactions that I am able to have with them. I love my friends, I love bowling, I love playing tennis on Thursday evenings. I love onsens. I love a bunch of stuff about life right now, but more than anything I love the opportunity that Japan has provided me to re-write myself as I would like to see myself re-written.
What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.
And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.
Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.
For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.
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