Words

January 25, 2004. I was thinking today how I write in my journal partly to try to capture, crystallize, remember beautiful moments that would otherwise just pass by like a fart in the wind. And I thought how that was impossible. I can't capture anything, and I don't need to, because if I keep playing my cards right, life will be an almost ceaseless stream of exquisite moments. I mean, it will be, but if I play my cards right, I'll notice it. And I thought of all the other billions of people and their countless peak moments, their numberless teas drunk in the clear morning light, finding a new friend squatting in the turnip patch, moments that don't yet have a place in my imagination they're so far from my experience. And they're all there, stuck in the timeline, all at the same "moment," and that's tremendous power. Tremendous to imagine inhaling into your head for a moment all the clear, peaceful, pure, gorgeous, calm, quietly blissful moments from a billion lives lived (at least sometimes) well. The potential we have for that, it could quietly shake the world.

People are so amazing. All our private, disjointed, unique, compartmentalized moments that words would shatter, cheapen, diminish... The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao. The most reliable way we have to communicate is through words (there are probably better ways that we haven't developed yet), and sometimes they can't touch, can't fit the feelings we have. I find different feelings and find myself using the same words to describe them. Yes, calm, yes, bliss, yes, exquisite. But so much more that I have no words for. Words tire and grow pale, but the feeling is always new and never hackneyed or tired. It can become that way if you try to box it in. Why do we keep doing that? How can we tap a power we're so bad at expressing, sharing, communicating? So often we have trouble even feeling it. But it's there. I guess we have to believe in it.