The Stream of Movement

Jain Temple, Ahmedabad

If you are knowing, you are doing things in a particular order. You see familiarity in the signs that you become used to. I go this way and this may or will happen. Often, in the environment you become used to, these signs may not please you, may not help you, but you understand them and find some comfort in their existence.

Until they are no longer comfortable.

Until the constancy of oppression changes the complexion of where you are.

Over time, you may decide your fabrication of reality has been maladjusted. It has been tampered with, misplaced. If it becomes relentlessly wrong, you may decide it is time to go. To leave the area of your confinement. You may decide on a search. A new adventure. A great escape.

You will treasure your narrative about this new place. You will bring your assumptions and more than likely they will be wrong.

Before you are going, though, you may find that you become selective in what you are seeing or knowing about your place of origin. You may find yourself in the best of all possible worlds, enjoying the finest of where you are. How pleasant this is. Knowing you are going can remove the stigma of your present situation.

And then you are not there anymore.

The expectation of travel is delightful. The long voyage is streamlined with accommodations. You pay for this unreal time of complete pleasure. The pleasure of leaving is intoxicating. The pleasure of going to a completely new place is also intoxicating. Here we live in a dreamy expectation of what was and what may be.

Then you are there.

It becomes as everyday as the place you left, only quite different. You must navigate your expectations. You must navigate protocol. You will find guides who will help along the way. There will be many obstacles. There will be many delights. Your comfort zone will be shattered and you will try to make things familiar. It will be a long process. You must be patient.

You find that going is also starting over. You may have forgotten how much that entails while in the comfortable situation you recently left. There was a routine. Actions you could count on to make things bearable. Signs that let you know all was well. You find your knowing is a kind of protection; a way to make sense of the chaos around you, to make sense of the other beings around you; to place you in the stream of time and the field of comfort. We seek such things whether we acknowledge it or not.

In the end, then, there is no end; only a reconfiguration of comfort, knowing, coming, going–a circle into infinity where the mind adjusts to the body’s demands.