Just Jumping

The above picture is of a member of the Masai tribe jumping in exultation near Olduvai Gorge, The birthplace of civilization. I want to jump with him. Somehow this communicates to something quite deep within me. In the midst of a celebration or thumping bass in dirty, dark bars or in the face of high-gravity, biographical news I have simply jumped up in the air. As high as I can, many times in a row. Feeling an epiphany giving birth to a wordless yell in my throat. I don't have any reason to think his jump is for anything truly different.

As a writer it's tempting to think or at least pretend that our entire experience can be expressed in words. Even knowing this not to be true, the writerly urge is to try and do it anyway. And so we end up with these massive sprawling works like Infinite Jest and Midnight's Children, beautiful and tragic and sad and grandly encompassing. But not quite everything. Music gets at something as well, something literature cannot touch. The visual arts. Film. All of them overlapping components of a Venn diagram that is our experience and yet can never really contain or transmit it.

I think the great pain of being alive is that our experience is individual. We so dearly want to share these things inside our heads and hearts with people around us and we love those that we feel we can come close to accomplishing this with. And yet we are alone. I will never be able to truly explain what it feels like to wake up next to her, to walk my neighborhood alone late at night, to stand atop a hill and look out over the landscape but really see the sprawling details of my life out there on the horizon and the shadows of buildings.

But I can jump. And it's still not everything. But at least you'll know that I'm alive, despite all this.