Joie de vivre I

Hello all,

Here's where it begins. Let's try to keep this up, let's try to put some work into this, let's have drunken nights where we try to figure out what our lives should be about, where we remember that we'll never have everything figured out, and that certainty is the death of dreaming.

It is hard to feel content in a place, like Chambana, where most of your peers are living their lives with the sole purpose of leaving that place. I have wondered, though, if the only way to be happy here is to leave regularly. To not spend more than a month straight here without escaping to somewhere, whether it's Madison, Chicago, home (wherever home might be), or more exotic locales (Vancouver, Malta, the war-torn beaches of Delaware). Where does this mentality come from, though? Why should it have to be this way?

And are there people who are in fact quite happy here, and don't feel a near constant need to get away, to have that next trip always planned?

For me, at least, the mentality comes from the idea that other places are where things are really happening. Where life is really being lived. Of course, it's easy to think that, not living in those places. But it can be difficult, when sitting in Mike and Molly's, the Blind Pig, Esquire, Bunny's, Crane Alley, etc., to think that life is being lived here with the vitality that could be found other places. It seems to me that people are always having the same conversations about the same people in the same places, and never tapping into anything real. Never tapping into the depth of human being, that realm where lives can change, where perspectives shift, where you feel like there might be something Greater than you (whatever that might be) pulling you forward, calling you, making your life about something, breaking through the selfishness that characterizes most of our day-to-day lives.

Of course, I'm generalizing, and I can't imagine that everyone in Chambana feels the way I do, or would describe their lives in the way I just have. But here, for now, is the bottom line: I hold a disdain for the mundane, and I sometimes look around and see people who seem to have settled into the mundane. I think these people have stopped trying to be extraordinary--I wonder, in fact, if some people have given up the chance they might have had to be extraordinary--and I see this as the death of human being, and I see this as sad.

But what is it to be extraordinary? What is it to be mundane, to be ordinary? Is it just a matter of perspective? Is viewing your life as extraordinary simply a matter of recognizing that the mundane life is as extraordinary as it gets, and that attempts to live extraordinarily are guaranteed to end in disappointment, since the extraordinary doesn't exist?

We'll talk more later.
Jeff