Escape

Nothing gives you more perspective – after a couple of weeks in which many thousands of people have died in Japan, and the term “radioactive plumes” has become a part of your vocabulary, and your boyfriend has broken up with you – than to stand in the dining car of a train with a glass of wine in your hand and watch a part of England, and then the Chunnel, and then a part of France zoom by.

Old cathedrals, new gas stations, miles of green fields that have been tilled for centuries, all against a gentle lavender-colored sundown… The weight of history, the weight of modern life, and the weight of the past two weeks all seem to blur together with the speed of the train.

This blog post has had three incarnations over the past two weeks, but I’ve posted none of them till now.

I’m calling it “the courage to not post when your heart is breaking”: Breaking at the sight of a fat-cheeked toddler in Japan being tested for radiation exposure on the news. Breaking for the white-capped Pacific Ocean, the backdrop to my childhood, to my whole life, and the way it may be affected by those radiation plumes. And breaking for a love lost after many attempts to keep it alive.

I wrote the first version of this post to the tune of evacuation sirens, as the Oregon Coast was on tsunami alert. The second version was a rant against consumerism, the way that our drive for more “stuff” also drives the operation of nuclear power plants on earthquake fault lines, not just in Japan but all over.

But I notice that my response to those multiple heartbreaks was to bring myself here to Europe, to a place that reminds me of ease, and peace, and hope. And yes, I consumed quite a lot of resources to get here. So I sort of had to take back my rant.

Maybe it’s more complicated than just “don’t consume.” Maybe it’s about being aware of what we consume and the way that it fits into the world, and also of what makes us feel most alive, brings us the most joy. It’s not that I plan to eat cheese and drink wine and reconnect with old friends in France for the rest of my life. But somehow it seems just the right thing to do, right now.

All of the things I did to “scare myself” in the week prior to the earthquake and tsunami seem insignificant in comparison to what nature and nuclear facilities have caused. Reducing the clutter in my life, looking at what I have to show for the past 20 years of life energy spent at work… these are nothing compared to facing the question that has come up for me since then.

It’s a question that I want to keep at the very front of my mind every single day, a question that I’m trying to address with this year’s experiment of stepping into my fear. But it seems to be a question that really only has urgency when something shakes us to our core and reminds us of how fragile our lives really are. The question is this:

What haven’t I done yet, that I long to do before I die?

I don’t know the whole answer yet, but I do know that I want to ask myself the question now, today, rather than waiting until it’s too late.

And while I’m asking myself the question, I want to remember to breathe in the view outside this train window – to watch as the lavender strip connecting sky to trees to land turns dark purple and lights begin to speckle across the horizon like low-lying stars.