IN again...

So, I didn`t think this warranted a mass mailing, but I was feeling that feeling again. The one that prompted me to wax philosophical the other day, and the result was the same this time.

So, I was feeling a lot of anxiety this morning. Erin says it`s the anxiety that comes along with living in another culture where everything is different, and I tend to agree with her. But I was riding my bike along to work and the feeling was just getting greater and greater. I pass students from my school on the way to work, them walking and me on my bike, and the feeling gets greater and greater. I keep thinking to myself about how I feel so afraid/anxious/worried on the inside and there`s no way for me to appropriately indicate that on the outside.

So I get to my desk at school and the work day starts. Of course, I realize that this feeling is coming, once again, from my sense of being cut off from everything around me, it is a sense of being alone.

I`m thinking, though, that I wouldn`t call it being `on the outside` though I still tend to think that has something to do with it. I`m starting to move beyond simple insides and outsides with the way I`m thinking about this/culture. I still think there is this fundamental desire or need or presupposition that we, as human beings, be `inside` of something. That which we are inside is what we typically refer to as our `outsides` (`I am inside my outsides` is manifest), though we delimit it physically in different ways. Some people think of their outsides as that which is on the other side of their skin, and some people think of it as all that which is physical about them, with that which is inside being their `soul, spirit, etc.`

Being in another culture, it`s not so much that I feel outside while everyone else is inside, as I wrote in my last entry, but that I have a different outside than everyone else around me... Additonally, this is not painful or anxiety inducing simply because they are different. Where the anxiety comes from is the experience of their insides and outsides being completely meaningless to me.

I want to try and ground this in my experience. What`s going on around me at this point, as I sit at my desk, is that people are going about their daily lives, like any office workers would do on a Monday morning in any first world country in the world. What`s cutting me off from that, though, is that none of it can have any meaning for me. Another way of saying it is that I don`t understand `why` so and so is going to the copy room. I know they go to make copies, but copies for what, about what, meaning what, what motivates them, who made that decision for them? I know they laugh, but about what, for what. `Why` is another way of asking the meaning. By meaning, I mean that something fits into my outsides, or that which I am in. When I ask why, I am asking how it fits into my outsides. In my office in Japan, I am surrounded by people for whom I can`t answer why, people who I can`t fit into my outsides, and so I am surrounded by mostly meaningless people.

In order to be something, my experience, it would seem, has to have meaning, or, it has to be a part of that which I am in.

The actions of those around me, these mundane daily tasks I`ve seen hundreds, thousands of times before, idle chit chat, making coffee, opening and closing windows, making copies, reading books, are meaningless because the insides of the people around me are meaningless. That is, the people around me, as insides, are nothing. Their insides are not a part of that which I am in. Though I can clearly see that there are insides there where there are people doing what people do, those insides are exist as nothing.

Language, then, must be that which makes other`s insides a part of my outside. Without understanding what people are saying, writing, hearing, and reading, their insides aren`t a part of that which I am in. Additionally, vice versa, my inside (this which is in) is not a part of that which they are in. Language, more symbols in my existential outside, gives their actions context and it gives me, however tennuous, a means of constructing their insides as a part of my outside, of giving them meaning, and of making them something.

I am nothing to them because my insides remain cut off from that which they are in, because I can`t bring my inside into their world of symbols, their outside, that which they are in. They can`t bring their inside into my world of symbols (language) so, though they are acting exactly as I would expect people to act, their actions are the result of nothing. Their actions, their insides, their world, their outsides, are all meaningless to me. They are a part of my outside but a part that doesn`t connect with my outside. This, obviously, brings me face to face with nothingness.

This nothing that exists evidently as a part of that which I am in bares a constant reminder of the nothing out of which I continually fashion that which I am in. That is where the anxiety I`ve been feeling lately comes from, from a nothing in that which I am in that I am constantly coming into contact with. I am constantly coming into contact with that Nothing, dark, lonely Nothing out of which nothing can emerge but within which all things exist.