Tonight I am in a great deal of pain.
It has nothing to do with snowboarding.
Tonight I came home from a weekend of isolation to find someone very special died.
I didn’t know him, and yet I knew him.
That fact alone upsets me.
He was the a partner of a amazingly inspiring friend who I love very much.
Life is so strange.
I was snowboarding down this little path today where the snow had not yet been touched,
I slowed down for a second, and in that second the board sunk into the snow throwing me softly on my back. The snow was so deep I couldn’t get up in my first two attempts. So there I lay, staring up at a beautiful sky with a hint of sun and snowflakes landing on my nose. I wasn’t thinking of him, I wasn’t thinking of anything. I started smiling, it felt good to be alive. I felt nothing.
And then I thought of the majority of the world that doesn’t have this good fortune that I do. Those who live in poverty. In warzones. In desperation. Suddenly the nothingness subsided into frustration and anger. Why do these ironies exist? Is this really life? Why do we allow it to work this way?
Sure plenty of things are unavoidable. But so many things in this world are created by we the occupants of this planet.
I just remembered saturday, when he died… where I was. I was angry and feeling sick. For some reason, lack of energy, strength, or concentration, I couldn’t hang on to the lift. I kept falling. Again I see irony. While I was fussing, being miserable and lonely, while hiking up endless hills of beautiful white snow, his struggle with sickness was ending.
And just to add to the irony, I come home to a safe and warm home, read about what has happenned, and decide that writing about this in my weblog is somehow noble.
The world is a perposterous place, filled with terrible irony. I’m part of those ironies, in some form. And just stating that does not magically exempt me from responsibility. Nor should it for you.
– in loving memory –
Juan Montealegre, August 28, 1966 – February 11, 2006