It’s not often when you get the chance to say that you are writing from above the world. Here I am, two-thirds of the way form Paris to San Francisco and it seems like a good opportunity to say so should not be missed. Also, I feel that I should check in with myself before arriving to anther dimension, another world, another life. This time is not going to be easy. Thank god I’m sober, and well done me. I’m worried though that this will be a challenge to my sobriety. This place is so triggering. I’m worried about seeing my mother; she must look absolutely terrible. I know that being sober will actually help me tremendously in dealing with everything. I just need a few small wins and I will feel reassured in this.

In flight is always strange. With a changement d’heure of 9 hours, it’s completely disorienting. I slept four hours last night and about 20 minutes on the flight so I will arrive very tired, at a time that feels like 2 am. Disoriented, confused, and overwhelmed, and not sure whatever happens next. This will surely be another one of those times. My mothers situation has continued to deteriorate. The family elders aren’t who I wish they were, often complicating things rather than helping, and there is still estrangement in our family which is both terrible and sad. The only real difference now is me, and my sobriety. I can handle this. I might not even see mom until tomorrow, putting myself first and getting my rest so that I can handle it, all of it. 

On this flight I’ve watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, and now I’m watching and listening to David Byrne perform Once in A Lifetime. It occurs to me that these two works are very much the same, in a way. They are about the same thing – what does it all mean, if anything, and how are we suppose to make sense of it all? What is happening now is only happening because of a series of choices. At any time, any choice could have led to a thousand, infinite number of parallel lives. It’s all so arbitrary, isn’t it? Or perhaps there are there souls that follow us, intersect with us, in all of those possible lifetimes. Is it all meaningful and meaningless at the same time. Does anything really matter, and my God, how did I get here?

There is no sense to any of it, unless, until you see the divine randomness of it all. Is it all connected? Is it any less magnificent if it isn’t? Sometimes when I think about, and lately that is often, I ponder the idea of no God, no afterlife, and think, wow, that makes it even more amazing. If there is and was no divine intervention, this all just happened, this beautiful, crazy, random planet of human freaking beings, just all happened, after millions of years, to me this is even more astounding than the idea of God.

Nothing really matters, and yet everything does. It’s us that decides. It’s us that can either embrace or reject the nearly Unbearable Lightness of Being in this dark, beautiful, terrible, magnificent world. It can be totally meaningless if we let it, yet even the most meaningless things can be infused with our own needs, emotions, wants, desires, and faith. For the weight of the beauty, intensity, mechanics of everyday moments – of delight, of loving, or simply of feeling alive and breathing the air, in the bright warm sun or in the pouring rain, or perhaps in bed, in the warm enveloping haziness between dream and awake – it is not heavy or hard, but the freest, lightest euphoria. Each little intimate connected moment is as simply astounding as any grand, planned production meant to impress, to create some sort of huge pronouncement. It is the former that makes up the ether of life. It is the aching guitar riff that reverberates in a minor key in a song played over and over to create the sense memory of a fleeting moment, then later an era, and finally a poignant part of the story arc of a lifetime, passed.

Everything is nothing but a black hole if we let it be – a nihilistic vortex of destruction, and why not? Why not choose that existence, so that nothing can ever mean anything, good or bad or anything at all. Why not destroy everything in your path out of the hatred you have in your heart, for yourself. For to do so is to lose out on everything, every feeling, every single human experience. We are made for beauty, for love, for connection. This is what it means to live, to risk the pain of losing everything by loving through, in spite of, our own vulnerability, to risk being hurt as to not miss out on the highest existence of love and connection, presence and awareness. Perhaps it is this bond of love and connection that enables us to exist forever, and everywhere, all at once. We must risk the pain of loss to love and live forever.

This is what I dream of as I try to sleep, miles above the earth. Trying to make sense of what happens when we die. Thinking of asking my mother if she will promise to haunt us. Hoping that the fantasies of film are true, and the gospels too.

…

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

You may ask yourself, “What is that beautiful house?”
You may ask yourself, “Where does that highway go to?”
And you may ask yourself, “Am I right, am I wrong?”
And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”

…