The Bearable Lightness Of Being

“I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” – Jawaharlal Nehru

I know how he felt, I feel the same way most days.  If nothing else like I don’t belong here, as much as my friends try to make me feel differently, I just can’t shake the feeling.

I am unable to put it all into words, the general feeling of dislocation is becoming stronger, I have had this feeling my entire life, and now at 43 its becoming stronger.  I feel like I don’t belong “here” in this time period.

Everyone has talents, and skills. The difference is talents are just “there” skills are taught.  Cooking is a skill (to do it well anyway), but the ability to draw is a talent, (one I definitely do not possess, I’d be hard pressed to draw a straight line if you nailed the ruler to the desk). But I do have talents; I have the ability apparently to “see” what others miss, to instinctively understand the world around me, almost in a Zen like way, even if I’ve never studied Zen. I often find myself telling people that I’m not psychic; I personally believe that those people exist, but I’m not one of them.  I can however look at a situation and pretty much tell you what is going to happen in a very broad sense, and sometimes very specifically.  To those whom I have made “predictions”, they themselves will tell you I run about 80% dead nuts accurate, with about 90% of the remaining 20% running in the downright scary category.  Don’t ask me the lottery numbers, because if I knew those I sure as hell wouldn’t be telling you LOL.

I recently had a conversation on the phone with a very dear friend, we got onto the subject of houses, what our perfect house would be like, it would have 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a basement etc. all the normal stuff you think about when you talk about where you would love to live, out in the country, in the city etc.  After we hung up, I picked up a piece of paper from inside my desk where I store my excess printer paper, and picked up a pencil and started to draw, now please take note of my missive above about my artistic talents, I aint got none, and I despise pencils, I dislike the scratchiness of them against the paper.  Anyway, in roughly 4 minutes 30 seconds (ok probably closer to 6 but hey time is relative) I had drawn a house. Don’t know why I drew a house; I just let the universe guide my hand, much like I do when I’m writing for the blog.  I phoned my friend later in the day and said I would like to show them my picture, since I don’t draw, can’t draw, and despise pencils to begin with; they are perfectly aware of all of the above and wanted to see it.  Well I ended up taking a photo of my drawing, lacking a scanner and all, and e-mailed it to them.

What came next shocked both my friend and I equally.  They asked me where I had gotten the picture from, and when I explained I don’t know, I just started with the pencil and that’s what came out.  They then proceeded to tell me that as a younger person (were both “over the hill” so to speak) they had drawn the exact same picture, almost 100% identical (at least as identical as one can get coming from two different minds).  They promised me that they would dig out their picture and send it to me for comparison.

Its these and other experiences that tell me I’m out of place, how is it I should know how an engine works, and have since I was 5 years old, I just “knew”, when helping my uncle work on his old Nova, how it functioned, what was wrong, and how to fix it, something no 5 year old should know.  I also instinctively know how to grow vegetables (although this year’s garden has been a bit peaked).  I also know, even though I keep a book around, how to preserve that food for the long haul.  If the world came to a screeching halt tomorrow, I’d make it to the other side.

All of this begs the question, have I been here before (wherever here is, ultimately there might be many “here’s” to be at or from).  If I haven’t then what explains my experience as a child and as a knowledge seeking adult that all, however anecdotal, the evidence of having traversed this existence before.

Others with whom I have spoken, also have had similar experiences, which were repudiated by their ostensibly “educated” elders as utter nonsense, the issue I take with this is that no one bothered to investigate it.  I bothered.  I found that while again highly anecdotal, the evidence is there that all of us have been “here” before, whether we know it or not.