The Day the World Changed

September 25, 2008 on 2:50 pm | In General Musing |

It’s raining.

Not that that is exactly a rare occurrence here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m cozily ensconced in a cabin on tiny Lummi Island sitting by a blazing wood stove. We’re here editing our novel. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached a point of having an actual beginning-to-end draft of the thing. It stands at about 105,000 words and is far from ready for publication, but with nothing much else going on and all this rain, we’re about a third of the way through the first complete edit and it seems to be coming together. I hope I’ll be this optimistic on the seventh edit pass.

Sitting here watching the clouds reveal and hide the mainland like the veils of some meteorological Salome reminded me of a day when another rainstorm changed my perception of the world.

I was a kid. We’d been visiting my grandparents and it had been raining all day. On the way home, the rain stopped. My father commented from the front seat that it was likely still raining back at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

This was a complete and stunning revelation to me. Up until that moment, I’d never once thought about geography away from my immediate surroundings. It was either raining or not raining. The idea that places existed and had things going on in them when I wasn’t there was profound. It changed everything. Suddenly, I was not infinite. My parents were people who had lives that didn’t have anything to do with me. My grandparents had rain when I didn’t. If I died, people would still have dinner and birthdays and school.

Of course on some level, I already knew this. But I’d never thought about it before. For the first time, I understood and the world took on a shape and an existence in time that I was one small part of.

The rain has stopped here for the moment. Looking out over the Sound, Mt. Baker and Bellingham have disappeared again. I wonder if it’s raining there?

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  1. This reminds me of one of my “Oh!” moments. I was newly married and my husband and I were driving to Wyoming. Somewhere around Utah, after hours of driving without seeing a blessed thing but dessert, I had this sudden vision of the huge spaces between cities. It was the first time I really comprehended that you could be somewhere that didn’t have a clear cut identity. Although I was an adult at the time and should maybe have been past these types of revealing moments, I had lived my whole life in Southern California and had not traveled long distance across the country by car before. I knew intellectually that there could be space between cities, my entire life’s experience in So. Cal. was that when you left one city you entered another. I had never experienced that empty space before. This is not earth shaking, perhaps, but it did fundamentally change the way I saw the world and my environment.

    Now that I think about it, many of my personal defining moments have involved travel. Traveling to Japan and experience life in a wildly different culture, and discovering my own previously unknown biases along the way. The first time I drove a very long distance by myself and discovered that it wasn’t particularly scary, and didn’t feel in the least weird to be “somewhere else”.

    My daughter is 14 now and I’m busily planting the seeds of travel in her mind. I’m encouraging her to save her money for a big trip to another country after she graduates high school. I honestly believe everyone should travel… the farther away from home the better. The more alien the surroundings, the more you end up learning about yourself.

    Pam

    Comment by Pam — September 28, 2008 #

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