Limits, Language, Life

Pushing yourself past the brink of utter exhaustion tells you a lot about yourself, namely that your threshold is a lot further out than you ever thought it was. You don't know how far you can push yourself until given the challenge to push and keep pushing. I think this is good for you. So much has happened I can't seem to comprehend it. Yesterday it felt like a dream, today it doesn't quite hold that dreamlike quality any longer but it certainly doesn't feel like reality. The sun rises early here and along with the birds I swear I can hear a rooster out in the distance. I'd love to sleep past 5 am but this doesn't seem to be in the cards for me. I need to put this big cerebral hunk to sleep and just play. Don't get stuck in thinking about what any experience could mean or be, just live it. I spend far too much time analyzing, categorizing, interpreting. I want to live my experiences and save the interpretations for later, they come whether we want them to or not anyway. Last night I sat at a table of all Israelis and while they tried to include me in conversation, at times they would all slip into discussions solely in Hebrew. I sat listening intently, feeling in a way that I could understand exactly what was being said even though I had no idea. I could feel myself being sucked into the beautiful, rhythmic quality of language, fascinated by the fact that these sounds, any sounds, as long as they're agreed upon, bridge our gaps in understanding one another. There was a time when I was younger (and this feeling still visits me frequently) when I wished I could understand every language. While my mother was shopping in a department store, I would stand, captivated, listening to people speaking a language I didn't understand, following the train of sounds even though I knew it was leading me nowhere. Without knowing the meanings of the words it seems you can learn a lot from how someone speaks. Without the burden of interpreting meaning we are suddenly privy to all of the other cues of communication: the tone, the speed, the volume, facial expressions, body language. When listening to someone speak in a language we understand we can't help but pick up on the meaning of their words. Words themselves become inadequate when trying to explain to someone a concept they don't have in their language. When the words cannot convey the meaning then we resort to our bodies- flailing arms, pointing, scrunching up our faces. How else do you explain to someone that knows limited English what you mean when you say "a bottle of soap exploded in my bag" and why it is this statement would be making you upset? Everything gets broken down into concepts, each item spelled out - the gesture of face washing to indicate soap etc. It's interesting to see how familiar you are with your own language. I have a feeling when I have traveled to enough places I will have come to the same conclusion that I have now - we are all different, we are all the same. I used to lament globalization, homogenization. But perhaps this is a trend within ourselves as human beings. Maybe we all want to become more or less the same. It's just taken a long time on a global scale to realize this.