命

The Chinese cobblestone road would not let me sleep. I had driven it before and still had memories of the winding ruggedness. Just left of the road, large mountains ran miles north and to the right, the ground fell away into the village filled valleys. My driver He shifu and I exchanged words and I struggled to understand his local accent. He was of a local ethnic minority and had been working as a driver for 20 plus years. This particular night, he was driving me two and a half hours through the Tibetan foothills to a small town at the edge of the Jinsha River. We were still only a small distance out and I was already feeling the beat down from my long journey. I struggled to hold conversation in an attempt to keep us both awake but quickly found my head bobbing. With each pothole, terrified, I would jump out of my seat as if to somehow stop an imminent accident. The excitement of the journey was quickly fading and I could feel uneasiness close.

It was in that moment of moment of anxiousness, that a feeling of loneliness overcame me. But the “remedy” to ease my mind “luckily” came quickly. The familiar thoughts friends and family and telling them how epic of a journey I had gone on began to comfort me. And for a moment, I didn’t feel so lonely. I knew however, that it was only temporary relief. These familiar thoughts could only comfort me for so long, before I would quickly be overwhelmed by the situation. But something unexpected happened. The crappy Chinese service road, He Shifu and his interpretable accent, the desolate roadside, the old fashion three-wheeled cars and everything else somehow sucked me in to reality. No longer did I feel like a lonely bystander observing the situation from afar. I felt part of this crazy midnight Chinese scene. No longer did I feel estranged and removed but engaged and full of life. At least for that precious moment, I was no longer living for some distant, intangible future but was living for a very different reason. All that there really was/is, the moment at hand.