something I wrote on the plane

Mmm, I feel bad for not having posted a synopsis of how things are going here, but I really have not had time. Last night, our group of co-op students went out for karaoke! It’s awesome in China. Really fun! :)

I’m posting something I wrote on the plane before I left. It’s a bit wishy-washy, but maybe you will still enjoy:

Here is what I am thinking of as I write this first entry. It is now 11:15 Vancouver time and I have been on this plane for over 10 hours. As I have been sitting here and coming up with activities to keep myself busy, the readers of this have had days filled with notably more activity than mine. I always find it kind of funny how I could be living a very tedious 10 hours and someone who I am close to could have had a most exciting day. And no matter how close I am, under these circumstances, we do not intersect. No matter how close we are, our emotions remain distinctly separate, and will exist independent of one another (at least until the point that I actually found out how your day went.) This sort of view reaches its extreme when we think of all those who are so much less fortunate than we are, who cannot even imagine affording a plane ride, and who must worry about malnutrition and becoming afflicted with malaria every single day of their lives. In these same days, they go through a multitude of dreams, hopes, tears, words, and changes. We say that we can understand, and our dollars pour into World Vision campaigns, and we get some sort of temporary feeling of these intersections. In reality, I think that the two are tangents which won’t ever cross unless we tweak the formula. Tweaking it certainly requires more than nodding to Alex Trebec on your TV screen.

Wait, this isn’t the way I wanted to start. I find that that happens a lot with my thoughts. I start in a particular direction and then they just take on a life of their own, and what I was originally trying to say is quite far from where I end up. But that’s okay.

I think that there are perhaps two ways to think of the world (I don’t mean to borrow here too heavily from Klosterman’s beginning or from 367): there is the view that the world essentially stays the same, and that there is little progress over time. There is also the view that things are in a constant flux, and that change is an essential feature of the world. Most of the time, I am partial to the latter view. Change is not something linear, however. We aren’t constantly moving towards “better”; instead, there are billions of threads of change which make tug and rub and make up the rope of progress. This relates to me only in that I, in some miniscule way, am also applying pressure on this rope. I hope (and, indeed, I think) this trip is actually exerting the sort of pressure that I want and need out of life.