Waiting or living?

I came across this video today and it reminded me of the person I want to be. Oh, I know it's cliche to love this book, but I sincerely do. And this piece of art, having people at Burning Man recite the lines, is inspired.

I watched the movie Point Break the other night. While mostly terrible, the movie has one very important redeeming quality: it discusses the difference between a sedentary life and one of movement. The distinction between the two is incredibly hard to parse out. In Morris Berman's book Wandering God he talks about the difference between vertical and horizontal ways of living. Vertical consciousness includes a lot of thinking about the future and the past, there is religion, a god or gods which control all that you are worried (and thinking constantly) about. Horizonality, however, is wrapped up in the present moment. It is about feeling the wind in your hair, or bobbing around in waves. Not thinking about bobbing around in waves, just simply doing it, without thought. That's what the surfers are doing in Point Break. They are living. Not thinking about living, but living. They feel the sun, the waves, the sand. They are moving, not waiting. There is so little time in life. Why is there ever waiting?!?!

This video is of people that are not waiting. Maybe this is an example of privileged people that have the free time for creativity like this. But horizontality is not limited to people like this. We find here only one example. But people all over the world can live horizontally. The people at Burning Man, they are living. Dancing, singing, playing, laughing, creating. Not everything they're doing is wonderful, but at least they're alive. They're not waiting!

But I am. I am waiting for so many things. In the immediate future I'm waiting for Friday, or the end of the semester, or for the end of the school year. I'm waiting for the end of next school year. But after that I'm still waiting. I'm waiting for enough money. I'm waiting for security. I'm waiting to start my life. And it seems that everyone around me is waiting too. So, it's hard to find the alive ones, because mostly they're gone. Once they realized all the time they'd spent waiting, they went seeking the life of living. I did it too once. But now I'm here, waiting again. I don't know how to get out of it here because I can't find many others that are not waiters. We are all waiting here.