Beautiful Japanese Torture

My life has come rushing down into the complexity of intermeshed feelings. To put it simply: I am overwhelmed with emotion right now. All kinds of emotion and directed all over the globe.

I love my life in Japan. I love my town and the people in it. They've become a part of me and I don't want to let go of it and become but a far-away stranger to them again.

My job, on the other hand, is certainly not my passion. If my passions are to make art, to write, to photograph, to communicate complex things with people, then my job lacks almost all of those things. And to make this job even worse they are restructuring my job so that I get to teach even less than I did before....

Why is it torturous? Because as close as you get to the people, the culture, the places, the food, the everything, as much as you fall in love with it, you must say goodbye to it in the end. If not goodbye (because you could attempt to move here for the rest of your life), then you are destined to remain (if not Japanese in appearance) but a foreigner and foreigners here are treated in a very specific way (not entirely uncharmingly at that). Then there is the enormous hurtle of becoming fluent in kanji, but I won't go into that here....

My passion for this place, as you can see and read, is quickly increasing as the clock starts running out. I will be feeling more and more inner-conflict as my departure approaches. I don't know what to do about it. I could go mad.

Then there are the places and people of my past. They are spread out all over the place having amazing experiences. Many of them are in the US. I miss you dearly.

Every choice seems to eliminate all others; the irony of consciousness. To be conscious means to see tragedy and limits. To see possibilities is to see limits. Consciousness, like much of what humans can be passionate for, is both foe and friend. To know all of the possibilities of life would be to die - for if it were humanly possible, it would surely kill you - and because it is impossible in life, perhaps it happens in death (but I doubt it).

To make matters more extreme the powers that be (as a topic) have recently come to my mind. For so long they have been lost in the cloudiness of my mind that winter had brought on. But because this is the impossible consciousness that I mentioned above, I don't think it will really ever be able to make matters that much more extreme.

In conclusion, it seems that spring has finally entered my body and awakened me from the inside out. The power of spring is very intense and I am grateful for, if intimidated by, its presence.