The Overview Effect
If nothing matters, then everything does: A six-month space exploration through the depths of depression and back.
I remember sitting in Paris with a Filipino nun at a cafe patio outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame after 8 a.m. mass, enjoying a croissant and an espresso, chatting mostly in broken Spanish about god and colonialism. It was August. A Sunday. Pigeons clucked and hounded us for crumbs.
I was alone — somewhere near the beginning of a 23-day mad-dash through 10 cities on 3 continents. She asked if I had stopped believing in god, why would I go to mass?
I’d woken up at 6 a.m. that morning, the overcast light of the sunrise enticed me to lace up my sneakers and go for a run. I hadn’t so much journeyed to the Cathedral so much as I just happened to pass it by on my way to nowhere in particular. I walked inside because, well, it’s just what you do. It just so happened that mass started in five minutes.
“I was in the neighborhood. I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to do it again. Belief or not, it is still my culture (I grew up Catholic on both sides of my family, with a whole contingent of French immigrants on one of them), and it felt right.”
I felt at home in a house of worship for the first time in half my life. I felt at home in Paris, alone, talking to a total stranger from half the world away, with whom we shared little in common except a current coordinate in space-time and a taste for soft French bread. It was there I began to see how singular every human’s journey could be, and how small concerns like nationality, career and religion can seem. We are all these things, yet we are none of them. Life out of context is still life itself.
She left before I did. I watched the sun peek out from behind the clouds, and the misty Paris morning fill in with vibrant color, sound and warmth. The pigeons and people cluttered the streets. Selfie sticks like swords in Lord of the Rings battle scenes.
Some people accumulate things. I accumulate places. I travel a lot. Often to new places. Often alone. Some people find that profoundly lonely — I find it profoundly exciting. I like exploring and discovering.
