Cicada season is upon us in the Southeast. God's Creepiest Creation has taken over Nashville just in time for the summer, and it really couldn't be more disgusting.
For those of you blessed enough to not know what cicada season means, there is this very large and disgusting type of black, red-eyed locust that (in certain parts of America) crawls out of the ground by the millions for about six weeks every 13 or 17 years in order to mate, lay eggs, and then promptly die. They make a deafening noise throughout the region, perching in trees, flying around drunkenly, and falling to the earth in exhaustion. People's reactions range from mild amusement or annoyance to paranoid shrieking or hand-flapping at the suspected sound or sight of one of these little monsters.
It's a popular thing to complain about them or make fun of them. Whether you have a deep-seated fear of cicadas or find the terror of others to be a constant source of entertainment, you always enjoy laughing at them. Crazy-looking, obnoxious bugs whose life exists only for the purpose of reproduction? What's not to laugh at?
At the same time, although I find cicadas incredibly revolting, I've realized that, ironically, the simplicity of the life of the cicada is actually the ideal for which every human seeks. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? What am I supposed to do with my one short life? How can I find a purpose without compromising my own happiness?
These questions are perhaps strongest when one graduates from school, and the terror is overwhelming. The pressure of family, friends, and bills weigh upon the mind even as the constant rejection from one job or another saps one's enthusiasm and confidence. They are strong, too, when you find yourself in the middle of the American economic recession in your 40's, your job pulled out from under you and the prospect of starting a new career more daunting than ever.
In school, when they teach you about bullying, they explain to you that the bully often feels insecure and sometimes jealous and that these feelings motivate him to pick on the kids weaker (and often smarter) than he. Perhaps we as a society mock the cicadas not out of a sense of dismissal but rather out of a latent jealousy. What would we not give to have the meaning or purpose of our lives to be built into our DNA? Our instincts?
What wouldn't we give to be as fulfilled as the simplest of creatures?
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
This house is fallin' apart
There is something about traveling that shifts you.
It's almost unidentifiable. You think at first that it is; when you return home, people ask you "So how was it?" and you give them a million different answers. You describe people, places, buildings, moments, food, everything you can think of. You feel something different within you, and you try to voice it by describing the cultural differences you encountered and how they changed you or inspired you. You talk people's ears off with chatter about far-off countries that they're tired of hearing about, but even though you know they're sick to death of you, you feel like you've only scratched the surface. You want to say so much more.
How can you ever encompass the profundity of another life or world or culture within those meager words, the confines that make up conversation?
Everything is different. Your entire universe is rocked by prolonged exposure to a way of living that is completely different from the one you know. It's a whole new perspective, and it challenges every definition of anything you've ever had. It's as if you've spent your life looking at a table as just a table and you suddenly encounter a people who use it as a mode of transportation. It's so different; the idea never occurred to you. Your mind and your definitions are stretched. You start to wonder what else a table could be used for. A chair? A display pedestal for toddlers? A companion? And you are filled with the wonder of this expansion of your accepted ideas and perspectives. You want to share it every moment of every day because it was so importantly profound and moving, and you desperately want everyone back at home to get a taste.
But describing a different life perspective is so much more complicated than describing the functions of a conversation. A thousand conversations couldn't accomplish that.
It's almost unidentifiable. You think at first that it is; when you return home, people ask you "So how was it?" and you give them a million different answers. You describe people, places, buildings, moments, food, everything you can think of. You feel something different within you, and you try to voice it by describing the cultural differences you encountered and how they changed you or inspired you. You talk people's ears off with chatter about far-off countries that they're tired of hearing about, but even though you know they're sick to death of you, you feel like you've only scratched the surface. You want to say so much more.
How can you ever encompass the profundity of another life or world or culture within those meager words, the confines that make up conversation?
Everything is different. Your entire universe is rocked by prolonged exposure to a way of living that is completely different from the one you know. It's a whole new perspective, and it challenges every definition of anything you've ever had. It's as if you've spent your life looking at a table as just a table and you suddenly encounter a people who use it as a mode of transportation. It's so different; the idea never occurred to you. Your mind and your definitions are stretched. You start to wonder what else a table could be used for. A chair? A display pedestal for toddlers? A companion? And you are filled with the wonder of this expansion of your accepted ideas and perspectives. You want to share it every moment of every day because it was so importantly profound and moving, and you desperately want everyone back at home to get a taste.
But describing a different life perspective is so much more complicated than describing the functions of a conversation. A thousand conversations couldn't accomplish that.
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