Half a world away

Had a moment this morning. I wanted to see the sunrise, so I woke up early. By 5:40 I was jogging out the door and down the road, out of town. I was running down the highway in the pitch black of night with the full moon keeping me company. Gradually, as I ran in a straight line for miles, the night faded, the sun rose over my left shoulder, over the Kalahari desert. The moon set over my right shoulder. I continued running, eventually doing a big loop and running through the middle of town and back to the Lodge. It took me 90 minutes in total, for about 12km.

It was one of those moments I'll recall for a long time, I think.

The thin blurred line

There's things that happen that I don't think it's right to write about, yet I want to write about writing about them. Someone at work that I had just met that day had a family crisis and had to leave. Just sitting here made me wonder, whether writing about the experience would be the ultimate in mercenary callousness or a candid snapshot of the brutality of life. Maybe it'd be a bit of both, and I wonder about it. I wonder further about the effect on our lives of wanting to record everything... some get-togethers these days seem to be nothing more than a series of posing for different peoples digital cameras. You know the pose... holding the camera out at arm's length, trying to fit everyone into the display on the back of the camera... the frantic hand signals and giggling then the crowding around the camera to see how everyone looked.. then back into position again for the next photo.

There's something to be said for storing for posterity the experiences of life, definitely. There are many experiences that pass us by and become nothing, because the memories are lost to us, or become distorted with time, and records independent of our memories help to bring them back to life. But there's also a field beyond the pale, where we try to record everything and forget to live things. It's a fine line, and I think we're wavering back and forth across it like a teenager who just discovered alcohol. Like so many things in life, coming down too hard on one side of the fence misses the point entirely, no matter which side you're on.... so I'll keep trying to find the balance that suits my life.