i woke tonight with a feeling of deep sadness. depression, perhaps. i realized that the last time i had been in japan was about 19 or 20 years ago. TWENTY YEARS. the memories of that time, which i believe were seminal, seem fresh, and yet in that interval, twenty years have passed. japan was still inscrutable, a country and experience which owned my heart, and yet was something that my heart could never understand or fully belong to. and back then, it inspired certain dreams about life, about purpose... and here i am, twenty years later, and feeling no closer to anything substantial, no different from the child i was so long ago, still duped by the same illusions. nothing seems to have changed.

... of course, things HAVE changed. i am married with two children. i have work that i believe in... but i suppose that in some ways, nothing has changed... i don't know how to put it. i realize that my focus on the present, on immediate purposes, it is basically a way to hide from some fundamental, irreconcilable truths... but in the face of certain things, i justify this reduction of perspective, because, well, i can't deal with that broad perspective- the idea that i can never swallow the world, that time passes quickly and makes our lives irrelevant, that in another few years, my present concerns (which largely revolve around my children) will have died and gone on, and what will i have to live for then?

there was an interpretation i had of martin heidegger's "being and time" which i thought was strongly buddhistic: the notion that a singular awareness of death led one to an epiphany about the purpose of life, and to live/devote oneself to that purpose... it is hard, at times, to believe in that purpose, because death questions all purpose. but we might say as well that death qualifies all purpose as well. what do i live for? and can that purpose survive, even as everything in life passes away? can it inform all of my actions so that they are authentic, and not merely distractions, or means to hide?

have i been hiding all my life? and what alternative is there to hiding?

***

all the lives i've touched. all the lives that have touched me. i'm sorry if i disappoint. death and life erase everything. i'm left an amnesiac (by choice?) every moment, trying to affirm this experience, this life, this world, even as all evidence insists that it is without substance...