Blog Entry

Pieces of a Broken Mirror — Piece 1

The journey somehow began in the highest capital city in the world, La Paz, Bolivia, one of the most economically depressed countries in South America. The city is 4000 meters above sea level, so high that it seems one can touch the sky easily with hands. But if you were new in La Paz, I would suggest you not to jump or run. You should know that in such altitude oxygen is at a premium, you might easily get dizzy and then the whole world would start spinning in front of your eyes. I am sure you wouldn’t want that to happen. But of course the 11-year-old monk couldn’t care less about all these, everything to him seemed to be like a dream, an adventure, a spring excursion that schools back home organized yearly, except this time he was not walking or taking a bus, but taking a giant airplane, traveling continuously for 3 days and 3 nights, from one hemisphere to another one. Home was nowhere near, home was thousand dollars away, home was out of reach.

Mysteriously sometimes fragments of memory just don’t fade away. They glitter in the dark and dusty corners of a mind, and every time when they take the center stage, and replay scenes of the past in full screen, the script of life seems to have been re-written. They have been added, deleted and edited, but somehow the truth is never lost, but rather enriched and clarified. Perhaps memory is like a good wine, the longer it is in store the better it tastes, but of course that’s another subjective opinion.

It is quite difficult for me now to explain what monk’s state of emotion was back then on that day, the day when he arrived that city. But I am positive it was not a single kind of emotion, it was plural, it was multiple and it was mixed. There was excitement, there was fear, but certainly there was no happiness, at least not at that moment. At the time, monk was a bit lost from all the recent changes; it was too many and too much, too much for his little mind to digest. Everything happened so fast, and he just felt that his little world was crumbling down, and he was buried under the debris, unable to breathe.

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