It's 2:15 am. I'm in bed, and I'm certainly tired, but I'm nowhere near asleep.
After falling asleep on Joseph, Seth, and Sam's couch (thank you for your services) during O Brother, Where Art Thou, and heading home to preform the regular bedtime rituals, I found myself in bed, desperately tired and completely awake. A quiet thunder storm had started outside, and the flashes were distracting me. I had too much on my mind to try to sleep. I wanted to watch the lightning, but the trees near my window were obscuring my view. After a quick check of the temperature outside, 75, I deemed the weather suitable for my bedclothes and headed out sans jacket or shoes to wander the empty Y-lot nearby.
An empty parking lot might seem like a funny place to watch a storm, but it's a perfect space to think and wind in aimless patterns between parking spaces. The lack of trees gave enough space in the sky to see the lightning through the marbled clouds, and I quickly found the rainy patches of asphalt that had been warmed by pipes running beneath. After an hour, most of the storm had passed and the rain was beginning to turn cold. I figured I had better go inside before I did irreparable damage to my ipod. (If you've never witnessed rain and lightning to Saint Saens's Le Cygne, I encourage you to do so.) I returned to my bed wet, shivering, and blissfully happy.
The storm is starting up again. I'm still not asleep. But the smell of rain in the air, and the trickle of droplets through my hair and down my back can clear my mind like little else. It shouldn't be long now.
I have a thought. Is an experience devalued once you bare it to the world? It seems to me that in this day and age, once someone has had a profound experience, or perhaps a merely significant one, their knee-jerk reaction is to post some kind of record of it on the internet for all the world to see. I've wondered for a long time about this. So many people do it. But once a few hundred people know about your significant experience, does that make it less significant, or does it create a context within which it can be shared, appreciated, and understood?
Let me explain.
I remember the first time I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I was about sixteen or seventeen, and I happened to bring the book along on a family road trip to pass the time. This was around the time in my life where I became attached at the hip to my journal (interesting mental image there). Sometimes I wish that I could read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on a road trip every time; there's nothing like it. Pirsig's imagery really affected me and I began to see things differently than I ever had before. I spent almost 24 hours round-trip alternating between feverishly flipping through Zen's pages and drinking in the scenery as it shot past, pouring my soul on to paper as the perceptions washed through me. When the trip was over, I had filled about a quarter of my journal with observations about the world and it's beauty, observations about how people work and how things work and how the world works, and on and on and on. I wanted feedback. I remember thinking I'd like to have a blog (bleck, that word) and share my words with people, so they could share words back. But what stopped me was this reservation I have that somehow, by opening my experience to public eyes and minds, it might lessen in significance.
I still have that journal. I've flipped through it a couple of times since then, but I would venture a guess that the words get a bit lonely sometimes.
Anyway, it's just a thought. I still haven't come to a conclusion yet... Or maybe I have, since this blog still hasn't been made public. I think I'll do that soon.
Maybe.
Goodnight.
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