i understand... even though i never really will

i spent a good part of my day today perusing blog sites. i bumped into quite a few blogs kept by other currently serving volunteers, people i have known from other walks of life and a particularly interesting one of a female marine who had recently served in iraq. i think i was searching for something, stories of other lives, other places, i am not quite sure what exactly... and this woman's detailed accounts, observations, remarkable pictures and hilarious commentary on such a wide variety of places and people, on iraq sucked me into her overwhelming archive of blogs from her time spent overseas. something about it hit very close to home.

what i did not expect to find was a link to many other blogs written by servicemembers during their tours in iraq and posts worldwide. she mentioned one specific blog in a post just days before she was deployed to iraq: a blog of a soldier who had been writing about his experience in the 'sandbox'. she recalled that she had been reading this blog regularly until one day the posts just stopped. after several weeks, she returned to the site to find that the soldier had been killed.

the internet proves again and again to be such an amazing resource. it is an instrumental outlet for communication that enables such profound insight into a world that i will never experience, into a world that she knew she was going to experience, and into the details of a life he was living in iraq. what struck me most was this passage, the opening words of this soldier's very last post...

"during bad or uncertain times, time itself doesn’t stand still or slow down, it’s more like it spreads out, like each minute has its own personality and some of those personalities really want you to get to know them. that happened with me today, probably with a few of us."

gosh, do i know this feeling.

somewhere deep inside of me i can imagine the soul of this person trailing off into a distant place, contemplating the porous boundaries of uncertainty, counting each minute as it goes by, witnessing how life morphs so ostensibly, so inevitably and absolutely in front of one's own eyes. i think of how long it takes to get to know someone, how long it would take to get to know each minute- i think of what an arduous, yet potentially enriching process it could be and i understand. i shudder at how raw it feels to be so alive, to live and walk through the minutes, not the hours, days or months, the minutes. and all the while the physical body obediently marches onward to somewhere unknown and unresolved.

i am floored to read this because it means someone else understands. someone else is talking about it.

this uncertainty, this understanding of how time dances or crawls by us in the presence of such uncertainty, resonates so deeply within me. and i think to myself, this is why i am here.