EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

 

 

 

Is it really? No of course not.  I believe that the only moment that everything could slightly have the chance to be illuminated would be the moment we die. That is not even absolute.   But since I am still alive nothing is actually illuminated and I am glad it is not.  If all questions are answered the search will end.  There would be nothing to look for.  But the understanding of certain states comes to you on their own time.   Time resolves everything, if only we didn’t have to wait…  Some things are more easily accepted by the mind than they are by the heart.  You need to level your heart to your mind, just like sometimes you need to level your soul to your body.  It is not easily done.  You have to work on it.

 

Now, forget the short story that I told you about the woman who became a victim.  Life has a tendency to bring trouble on you but the truth is we are the ones that find them.  Life is like a map without anything on it.  Just a piece of empty paper showing us we can do anything.  We are the ones to draw the lines, paths, roads, targets. We are the ones to set the limits, make up the borders, and invent obstacles.   I have decided for everything that happened to me, with every choice I made.   Sometimes in my life I knew that the path I chose was not the right one for me, but there is no such thing as right or wrong in our lives through our own eyes.  Everything we do, live, see or experience is just a bump, or scenery on the road.  It might be beautiful at that moment and we may forget it the next moment or it might hurt us in the deepest darkest way but may teach us something we never will forget. 

 

To doubt your choice is the biggest mistake we make.  What we have left behind should be out of the mind and out of the heart.  The choice might seem wrong sometimes, but we can never give up in faith in our selves.  We have to believe only us, nobody else.  This may sound as if I am trying to convince myself…

 

My mind wonders sometimes.  Back to Nepal.

After the hierarchy of needs has developed and surprised me, I got use to the slowness of life here.  Waking up at 06:00 but not doing anything until 14:00 became so beautiful after a while.  I read all the books left behind by other volunteers, listen to music, dreamed, wrote, draw…  Close to 14:00 I made my lecture plan. 

With the younger children we practically play games in English.  They love it that way.  Their English is so little that without fun they wouldn’t be able to enjoy the class.  Just like it should be.  I realized I missed the childhood that was not corrupted by technology and civilization.   Our generation was the last to enjoy that kind of childhood.  We did have to inform our parents yelling from under the balcony to tell them we were fine while playing on the streets, until sunset, covered with dirt, totally unhygienic.  We weren’t taken away from friends who were sick, we didn’t have cellphones, the food sold on the streets were still poison free, we only had a few toys. Computers, ipads, Xboxes, wiis, ipods were not invented yet.  If our ball was lost we couldn’t go buy a new one, had to find another game to play.  Our moms didn’t disinfect us when we came home,  we buried our dead pets in the yard with ceremonies, nobody secretly put a new one instead.  Those were good times.  Nowadays everything is wrapped up with stretch film, put in jars and stored on shelves.    Seeing these children I remembered my grandmother, she took us directly to bath only when we wet ourselves because playing was so fun and we couldn’t make it in time.  Other times we were told to wash our hands, which the little rebel in me sometimes didn’t.  We would wipe our noses with the sleeves of our tshirts. We never got dysentery.  The ice cream shop didn’t ice cream with salmonella.  We ate from the street corners and are all still alive.   A towel in our backs for sweat in the summer and a pair of gloves in the winter was all we needed to stay alive…

 

Yes, times have changed, education has changed, diseases have evolved but how about what we have?  Nowadays there are no children left who would sleep with their new shoes beside them, keep the toys in their original boxes… They don’t appreciate anything and nothing is enough for them.  Because they have everything.  Because we buy them everything.  We buy them anything we couldn’t have.  10 year olds have computers, cellphones, ipads, guitars…  Nobody should ask what we did wrong, it obvious…

 

 

Children here play with stones, bottle caps.  They do their own homeworks, finish chores in the house to come to my class.  They come because they want to, they don’t have nice clothes, fancy notebooks, or cool pencils.  But when the class is finished, they throw themselves on the floor and scream no finish!!  They eat nothing but rice and lentils, they don’t have a room of their own, but I never saw them crying over something, except the day I left…..