Looking Out

Looking out at the still unfamiliar street, despite having lived here for almost a year, it occurs to me that perhaps the things you want or the things you think will transpire are only an illusion. Instead, it is the one thing you are doing, when everything else seems to be on an uncertain edge, that one thing that is working is working because it is the thing that is actually you.

Moving 3000 miles, you cannot possibly know what to expect and still you do. Think of things, anticipate what something, someone, or someplace will be like to make it less unfamiliar, even though you also know that you have no way of anticipating what awaits you there. Anticipation is a funny entity. We wait hoping for something that really has no existence except in our minds. Like the first time I went to Paris, I had anticipated it for so long, thought about it, dreamed it into existence, that the reality of it seemed anything but real. Anticipation makes us forget reality.

What becomes us is not what we dream, but what we do not dream. The very undreaming of things is our reality, despite that Proust said, "if a little dreaming is dangerous then the cure for it is to dream more, to dream all the time." Perhaps that is the cure because eventually we see the dream is just what it is. Like Marcel's disappointment in meeting the actual Bergot, to dream more mean one finally meets the dream itself, that is the dream looses its power in the reality of itself.

But I digress. My point is that in moving, I have found nothing of what I anticipated, and instead discovered everything that I could not possibly see. We know nothing. Reality moves through us; we do not move through it. The agency that one thinks they have over the world is an illusion. Expectations are the dream itself. Reality is the beauty that we cannot immediately see.