After four years of reading, writing and scratching my head, and a last min cram, I have submitted a 60,000 word thesis on “Narrative and Peace: a ‘New Story’ to address structural violence”.
During those years I have also presented papers in India, Krakow and Sydney, travelled around Europe and had a horrible scooter accident, taught two undergraduate courses at a university in North Carolina and visited Chicago, New York, and Seattle, spent three weeks with friend in Vancouver, taught yogalaties in Nicaragua, bought an apartment, fell in love, holidayed in Cambodia and Fraser Island, was blessed by the Dalai Lama, mentored students in Tokyo, and built a network of amazing and wonderful friends across the world. And that’s not even half of it.
It is at times like this, when a big project ends, that one reflects on the worlds within that world that have come and gone during that time. The mind emerges as if it has spent weeks or months or years in a cave. The eyes struggle to adjust to the onslaught of light.
It is very much a feeling of world collapse (as Heidegger calls it). One world has ended, and another must begin…
Used to running a hundred miles an hour on the details of words, sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, references… my mind now has to adjust to society. People. Conversations… Did a Malaysia Airlines flight really disappear?
The last time I felt the experience of worlds ending and beginning was in the midst of this thesis world I blogged about it— “Thrownness to Many Worlds”.
Now it is time to relax, reflect, socialise and think about: “what next?”
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