Coming Home

My friend Ari just sent me an email with a short story written by a friend of his. I do not know this third-party friend and feel strange quoting his words, because I cannot adequately cite his work. I have no name, no website or blog to which to lead you; I only have his words.

As I sit in the airport in Shanghai at 8:39 am waiting for an eleven hour flight that will take me home to San Francisco, the words seem to resonate with me:

To me, life is all about exalting in those rare moments of clarity, brilliance and elation one is so fortunate to get every so often. They are small and far too short but so intensely, purely wonderful -- maybe, if you are lucky, a total of 5 minutes a week (but too often far less), reveling in the wonder of the beauty of the world and not wanting to be anywhere else with anyone else. You have them. You know what I am talking about. You stay alive because those moments of peace and happiness and wonder are better than any drug or religion or any fiction or construct -- they happen half from good fortune and half from worthy effort, and you just get them and they are the reward, and that's why you'd never choose to be dead over alive because you'd be crazy to miss out on even one more chance of that kind of moment being available to you.

The sun is shinning all around me and outside a strange social experiment called China rummages in and around the earth searching, searching. The soft music plays in my earphones and in a few hours I will cross the Golden Gate knowing that I am home. I have no idea what home means anymore, but I know the feeling this golden span gives me. It is something very similar to what was described above.