Peace

Sunday I took a bus home from Mexico city and sat next to this woman. She was petite with dark, short hair and and her eyes twinkled from the streetlights outside the dark bus. I started talking to her and found out she was an art history graduate student in the university in Cuernavaca and that she spoke English perfectly. I told her that my mother had also been an art history major and I started asking her about what I should see, what she had studied, and so on. I learned that the Robert Brady museum, which I'd already been to, was the best in Cuernavaca, but that I should definitely go back to Mexico City to see the museums there.

I also learned a little about the artist she is writing her thesis on. His last work was to sail off in a boat which was never found again (I think she's talking about Bas Jan Ader). She said that his works of art were acts of living, things he did. This reminded me of Thoreau, and also a little of myself and what I was doing this year. Maybe meaning in life comes, in part, from aesthetics. It's not why we do things, but what we do that has meaning.

Next she said something that startled me because it crystalized something I'd been starting to feel. We were talking about traveling, and she was telling me about the time she spent in Prague. She said that traveling was very comforting. I had been thinking, so far, that traveling was very stressful because I was constantly asking myself who I was and why I was where I am. But more recently I'd been relaxing more, because I was noticing that if I was unhappy I need only wait because things will change as my journey continues. This is different than normal life where difficult or troubling things accumulate. It makes sense that this year off should feel liberating, but that moment was the first time I actually felt it, experienced it.

After an hour and a half of talking to her, I started to wonder if I should get her email or connect on Facebook or try to hang out with her some more, but before I did she said she had to go, got up, and the bus driver let her off. Just like that. I didn't mind. Instead, I was reminded of something I read about Tibetan buddhists who visited Berkeley a few years ago. They spent days creating intricate art from pieces of colored sand on the floor. On the day they were revealing it to the public and everyone was standing around admiring and photographing it some kids were playing nearby. One of the kids fell onto the work, scattering the individually placed pieces of sand. The crowd gasped in shock, but the monks just smiled and laughed. Later, they swept the floor with brooms, completely erasing all of their work.