The Geography of Passion

I am devouring The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and my brain is brimming with philosophy!! Oh the masterpieces of literature, how thee feedeth my soul!

And here, a personal discovery:The geography of passion is a fiery one. It quakes and trembles from love to hate to love in a whirlwind of desire that makes for a livable, invigorating torture. Both malignant and benign, feeding fury while breathing life in heated, heavy exhales. It is inescapable, undeniable and all at once demise and creation. It's a concussion for the deep of you, that tender, vulnerable, emotional, horribly personal part of you that makes you you and not any other wayward sailor. It puts wind in your sails, pushing you into infinity, charged and moving, alive but stormy. It consumes you in the most vicious of ways: delicate but always threatening to crush you. And still, in all the turmoil, we embrace the flames and take the poison because to be without is just not to be at all.

In volunteering, in art, and now in medicine, all the pieces of me fall apart, away, dissolve and are immediately replaced with similar but different parts and this is my personal evolution.

Perhaps that is all life is: a balancing and great digestion of ambiguity and paradox. All that which makes us frustratingly uncertain is entirely the glue of the universe and nature. Is it not complete chaos at the center, at the most microscopic? There is peace in that madness, I cannot know for certain but that I do trust. This may be what all those zen masters are searching for, that peace in the chaos...

In my own life, I suspect many think I am a massive hypocrite or completely delusional the way I tend to do the exact opposite of what I say. Perhaps you think it immature or reckless, and in the context of your world you'd be entirely accurate. You are strict with your philosophy and mind set, which is itself admirable and fascinating, enviable even. My world, my constructed theories and perception, is fluid, always in flux. Here, everything is complex, but not necessarily complicated. In fact, much of it is simple, just, simply chaotic. There is so much to consider, and so much uniquely co-dependent, conjoined. Here you can commit only to the fact that what you're committing to is itself transient and impermanent, at least in how you know it at that precise moment in time, whatever that is. You adjust and accommodate constantly here. It is the code of life, it is the design of nature itself. When a natural disaster strikes and wipes away man's creations, does the earth beneath it die in sympathy? No, no it does not. It persists! It survives! Always. Earth explodes and the pieces become something new in the great open space. Everything is always changing, always fighting for life and more of it. Now is always slowly slinking into the past and the future is becoming the now and so forth.

Always everything is at once rising and in ruin.

We merely juggle the pieces as best as we can, being the messy, fumbling humans that we are.

And oh how we do it so beautifully.