In-Transit Reflections

From Random

The light in our compartment flickered as the train ricketed onwards. We were on the second to last leg of our trip, exhausted and, for the moment, out of words for each other. I was plugged into my ipod, head resting against the glass wall that separated our compartment from the train's hall, staring through the grimy window into the darkening Moroccan countryside. I was feeling flat, disembodied. I was in "go" mode, computing, reacting, barely analyzing. Deeper ideas, poetic nonsense or philosophical meanderings seemed to brush up against my mind, but never held. Saturation. This sponge was done.

The people here are happy, I started to think. The vast majority live in rundown buildings we Americans would, perhaps, call shacks. They squat to shit, don't sit, advocate no microscopic obsessions, eat with their hands, artfully, organically, and live and breathe the same air and water their food comes from. On warm, sunny days, they walk right out of their doors onto the grass and lie under the sun with their grandparents, their parents, their children, their love - they lie on the same grass their livestock graze on. They don't sport etnies or rock out on Linkin Park in between Cafes full of Dante-quoting friends and brightly lit productions full of beautiful people and coveted "essentials." But, they're happy. They're alive. They're not addicted, needle to the vein, like I am, to the pomp and glitter of my technicolor, manicured, streamlined existence.

Everything in moderation. Alhamdulilah.

What matters then, anyway? I started asking myself. What am I looking for? Where do I want to be? What do I really need?

What am I doing? I mean, what am I doing, here, in Morocco, an ocean away from my family? This sensation, almost burning in my blood to seek out the strange, unfamiliar, foreign, to tread upon as much of the vastness of the world as I can possibly squeeze into my lifetime and my lifeframe, started to falter.

What am I doing? Marvelling at these stones, here, that someone, long ago, set up into a castle for his or her own life, that person, now long dead, that castle (home) now crumbling. What am I doing, chasing this dust? This awe I feel standing in the place where all the facts of history (the stories we are told) took place, in actuality, do these facts converge in this spot into some kind of truth? Does standing in a Hungarian castle upon which Hungarians and Turks fought, does walking in a garden shared by Roman and Arab conquerers over the centuries, does standing at the lip of the Mediterranean upon which countless histories have sailed - does this give them any less or more truth, does this change or teach me in any way? Or is it all just dust?

Everything in moderation, alhamdulilah.

Why am I here? Beyong asking what I need to live, what is it I'm living for? Out of all the dust that comprises the human experience on earth, what do I most want? What do I live for?

Sometimes I feel like the human experience, as a whole, is a continal process of rebuilding and crumbling. Stuff your brain through high school, back to zero for college; work yourself to limits in college, back to zero for "the real world"; are our lives truly drawn out in waves?

Faith, they say, moves so. Up and down, High and Low, Strong and Weak. Humans, we're taught, the Forgetful that often Remember. Subhan Allah.

In my wanderings I have discovered that the only guarantee of any sort one can have, is the connection of the spiritual body to the physical, and it's that we guard. This, my body, none like it, a unique composition of tissue and genetic design, the vessel for my Self. And my God, this blood, this blood that runs through me, this very real and physical thing finds its partner in three other individuals on this Earth. My parents are of different stuff, and they find a place in me, and I in them. But my brothers, these other, sentient, moving, breathing, individuals whose existence I take for granted - there are no others in the world that can claim what they can, that we are the flesh and blood of our parents. We are each other. Our vessels, for all their minute and infinite difference were formed in the same womb, from the same blood, and our cells contain the same histories. We are irreversibly bonded, and when our parents pass on, we are mini-embodiments, we carry our families history within ourselves, connected wherever we are, forever, by this bond and this shared self.

I almost fell to tears realizing that wherever my brothers were, would always be my home.

And wherever I was, I would be theirs.

Until my dying breath.

And that is one of the reasons I live.