Doubt is useful for awhile. . . . But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
– Life of Pi, Chapter 7
In the course of 6 hours on the bus from Kathmandu to Pokahara I have finished Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in one sitting. I am moved in ways I haven’t felt from a novel since James Joyce’s The Dead or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The novel mentions regions I am bound for on this trip (Madurai, Pondicherry) and the places I’ve already been (Munnar, Chennai). But more than that, it describes a spiritual journey and the meaning behind storytelling. I won’t succumb to the notion that this trip or blog of mine is a feeble attempt to force meaning into life as if some fetishized search for the exotic. I refuse. But the past few days has provided me greater clarity into why this blog exists, and what I have been attempting to do without knowing what or how.
After my soulful conversations with Mona in Dubai, my dreamlike experience at Petra by night, and reading both The Alchemist and the Life of Pi within the past week, I have come to arrive at the idea that the road of life– at least for me — makes more sense as a sum of its parts than the individual details inherent. Hopefully one day I could look back on my stories posted here and appreciate a unifying form in its madness; to see a whole idea instead of a string of potentially incoherently linked posts.
And perhaps, it would be this very moment when I am typing these words out on a rickety local bus under a black Nepalese night sky on a desolate mountain road, I am about to arrive at the consolation that for some reason, life as a whole can make sense to a wandering soul. It is possible. Maybe I won’t feel this way in 5 minutes, tomorrow, or years from now, but right now I have nothing to do with the uncertainty of the future. It doesn’t exist yet. So I live now. And ‘right now’ is telling me something meaningful can lie within every single minute we bear our existence. We just have to learn how to look hard and deeply.
And just as an unknown future, this bus rolls on into darkness.
- At time of posting in Pokhara, it was 78.8 °F -
Humidity: 79% | Wind Speed: n/a | Cloud Cover: light rain
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