stepping in and out of my limited perspective

At some point in my life, I suddenly gained the realization that everyone has his own perspective on life. More specifically, the people in the room at the time when this epiphany hit me were all thinking and seeing everything else in the room from their vantage points. I know this is so ridiculously obvious, but I can tell that this is not a thought that is even remotely on my son's radar right now. And this thought explains so much, and makes me be a lot less blase about people in general.

My point is, it also makes me realize that nobody else truly understands exactly how another person feels. Not truly and exactly, you know? It's all approximations, with some people being better empathizers/guessers/imaginers than others. And that's also why I'm sure that the life Daniel and I have been living for the last two years probably looks a lot different to other people than within our little family. We've picked up and moved from Pittsburgh to China to Seattle to Taiwan to Israel, with paperworks galore and need to figure out how each of these places provides for Daniel, Declan, me, and now our daughter-to-be as well. In this month alone, Daniel, Declan, and I had: (1) an encounter with a wild boar in the middle of the night during the dark of night while trekking through the Carmel forest along a path that (we found out last night via a friend who actually finished the trail) ends in a Jewish cemetery, and (2) evacuated along with a full busload of other passengers off a bus that ended up burning down to its charred skeletal frame. 

The funny thing is that when people hear about all of our moves, they think, wow, you're traveling all over the world. How exciting! And when they hear about the near wild boar goring and the burnt down bus, they say, what adventures! Sometimes when I distance myself from, well, myself, and think about our lives, it does seem pretty incredible. But mostly, we struggle with loneliness that comes from being constantly uprooted, culture shock at needing to fight for daily needs in a new system with a new language, and just psychological fatigue at being so rootless and constantly living out of our luggages and sublets--with no end in sight. I must admit that I do, in a way, really appreciate these two recent events. Suddenly being confronted with a very real possibility of a wild boar seriously injuring my husband and son, or when everyone was running swiftly off the bus with the question on all our minds as to whether it's a faulty bomb about to explode, there's that jolt of reminder: Every moment of our lives is not to be taken for granted.

It's just a fact so easily forgotten when I get so used to living out of my own perspective. I get bored with myself, and my life, yet stressed and tired by the lack of community and groups of friends that I enjoyed during graduate school in Pittsburgh. But it's true what someone said when she commented that God must have a legion of angels protecting me and my family--it reminds me of the car crash in 2006 that everyone at the scene said I should have died in. It reminds me of a lot of things that has happened along the way to my little family that we always thanked God for taking care of right after the crises passed. I think my struggle with feeling so alone and scared and worried about our present and future leaves out a lot of this kind of perspective. The viewpoint that a legion of angels has been appointed to our family, charged by God. Enough things have happened for that to not sound at all ridiculous to me. 

Hm.

Credit: Paul Caruso's Twitter account for the Jerusalem Post

Egged bus no. 28 after our evacuation