Lightness and Weight.

Sometimes, I think I wish I could be everywhere at once. Or rather, I could be everywhere I wanted to be when I wanted to be there. I wish I could just will myself to be next to someone who needs it, wish I could do my makeup in my room at home then step out the door into a Norwegian cabin with my best friends, wish I could hear how you're doing and then find myself sitting across a table from you, holding your hand while you calm down, wish I could fall asleep in one place and wake up in another. I often think that I want to be able to do those things.

But then I start to really think about it. I realize that if I could do that, if I could be anywhere I wanted to be instantaneously, then life becomes absurd. Time and place drop away. Those things that keep me anchored to this world cease to mean anything at all. In the American folktale, "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", Jonathan comes to understand so much that time and place mean nothing to him. He can fly to the past, to the future, to New England or India or Pluto....he can, literally, go to any thought. I avoid saying any place or any time because place and time mean nothing to a life lived outside of them. Jonathan thinks this is a beautiful thing, the moral of the story being that through knowledge and passion, we can all break our earthly chains and become bigger than our mere biology. This is implied as beautiful, as desirable. As much as I love the story (and honestly, read it if you haven't. It'll take you an hour), part of the message is wrong.

Breaking free from everything that holds you to anything is horrible, soul-robbing, and terrifying. It's inhuman. I'm sorry, Rousseau, but when you lamented that man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains, your emotions were misplaced. For the simple fact that we are free but yet not free, because we are anchored to time and to place, we are human. We are more than nothing. If an event happens over and over again into infinity, it becomes meaningless. Eternal return is not the heaviest of burdens, it is the absolute lightest. It is nothing. And nothing is not freedom. Nothing is a lonelier and more frightening prison than any that man could create out of something.

It is our inability to be anywhere we want to be that allows us to live a significant life, a life of genuine love and passion. Love could not exist in infinity. Love is our fitful grasping at happiness for we know it is temporary. Love in and of itself requires the temporality of human beings. Passion is what fuels us to do as much as we can because we do not have forever and because we cannot do everything. Passion allows us to prioritize, to focus, to do the most we possibly can while the ever-quickening pace of mortality tries --ultimately always does-- to beat us to the finish line. Because we can never be fully done, we are allowed love and passion. Both depend on time. Both depend on place. Both depend on certain chains. So when I start to think that I wish I could be anywhere whenever I wanted to be, I remember that not having that ability is what allows me to want to be anywhere in the first place. And for that, I am grateful.