Metamorph

[Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago and delayed posting because I was trying to track down the name of the tribe so I could link you to it, but since the Internets have failed us thus far, here's the - slightly vague - story.]

I'm in quite a state lately. Boywich was telling me about an aspect of the language of a particular Aboriginal tribe in Australia, which describes a state of becoming, and for which there is no exact English equivalent.

We were talking about the degree to which our language reflects and reinforces the way we experience time. We may talk about the future, but we imagine it as a static point in time. We only ever think of the now. Current events, new, modern, 2.0.

It's not that we don't care what happens next; we just can't conceive of the flow of time. And it's no surprise, perhaps, that for many of us things seem to happen suddenly. We wake up one day and look in the mirror and exclaim, "I'm old!" Death seems to be sudden, even when someone's been ill for a long time.

Because of this, we don't really experience change. We notice its effects but it's hard for us to feel it happening. Or when we do feel it, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable. It makes us feel that nothing is stable, nothing is permanent, we can't rely on anything, and it makes us nervous.

But that's what I'm doing right now; I'm becoming. I'm in a state of tidal change, and boy does it feel strange.

I'm trying to remind myself of all the things I love doing that are states of flow, of motion, of being neither here nor there.

Or rather, of being always in the moment that flows into another one, smoothly and naturally. Bicycling, traveling on a train, knitting.

It's not quite the same as the tribe's perception of time, but it will have to do.