it's always sad to move on. I speak not about other people, but from internal states, versions of your being. moments when you say,

"ah-ha, my god, I've changed, what was interesting is no longer interesting; what was not interesting is now suddenly interesting; I find myself oriented towards other views, other things, other aspects of my being."

To use a travel-wandering analogy, which I always think is so helpful, it would be something along the lines of:

"oh, it's different; I thought I wanted to round that corner and find an alleyway, but something has changed; maybe it's the fact that I did just have lunch, but I would like to go wander through that cemetery instead; or maybe it's the fact that I started talking to these other people and we decided to go explore a plaza; either way, alleyways are nice, but no longer as interesting as they are as other things. And so I wander that way."

Or: I am in Jerusalem, on the Israeli side, and it is 2012, and still a similar version of me. I am reading Marx, still, and it is after Occupy, yes, but now I am imbricated in the process of this central dilemma that seems to have been this (gordian) knot for so many, and I am reading Tom Friedman, and Robin Wright, and Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said, and Haaretz, and Eyal Weizman, and way more, and being caught up in this struggle of a mind, because everything is so tangible, so important, so much at stake here, in this small country of a place, so many bodies on both sides talking about being shot, or bombed, or terrorized, or terrorized, or unfairly searched, or unfair captured, and onwards, and everything has the vitality and urgency of war, in the way that soldiers talk about it sometimes, how everything becomes more vivid, sharper, crisper. And I am in the process of wondering how to talk about these things, what they mean to what people, where it feels a little bit like any mention of this brings a hush down upon a room. Yes, yes. And so I am in Israel for the first time, and we are in Jerusalem, wandering around, looking at thousands of years of history, and with the continuous realization that this is the place that invented history, almost, this is the place that invented one idea of religion.

And then (and even though this paragraph break is very dramatic, in this life sometimes things are not so rapturous/rupturous) I enter onto a clearing with a friend, and we have been wandering some bazaars, and we realize we can go up onto the roof. And so we do so. And then the roof has this other network of doors, clotheslines, scattered toys, the young IDF soldier with her youthful ponytail and youthful assault rifle slung casually on her youthful shoulder. And it is sunny and gorgeous and it is so easy to fall in love with this tumultuous rich gorgeous palimpsest of a city, and it sounds like kids playing running after each other (with the serious full-intensity playfulness that kids playing will have), and the IDF soldier glances at us, and looks away, and now I like this city, of course, I have liked all aspects of this city, these countries (?), these places, all of these cities, I have liked all of this, all of this has felt so vital and interesting so far, and so crucial, so connected to the presence of my body, my body in relation to steel bars at checkpoints, in relation to gates, in relation to 1" thick plexi, or 2.54cm thick plexi, and the starbust-like drill/drain hole pattern in the plexi that is supposed to let sound through, and the heat of the sun, and the industrial fans that are both A) a godsend B) just amplify the herd-of-cattle like feeling that the materiality of these passages offer you ----

And where are we now? What was my point? I circumnavigate around it.

I need, want, need crucially for things to 'touch the ground', more importantly, to touch the body, to have some impact on a being. 'Body' being inclusive of mind and psyche and ground for cognition. 'Body' being inclusive of the fleshy material that we are constituted out of; the chroma of our skin and the historical categories that constitute these very constructed and very real categories we call race; 'Body' being inclusive of conceptual thoughts that are altered because one lives in a warehouse and changes their mind about What Architecture Is and What Space Is; 'Body' being inclusive of a casual comment in a cafe about a late friend that leads to a succession of sorrowful emails and a gorgeous ceremony on a gorgeous day and a strange train ride out to nowhere; 'Body' also talking about the sense of wonder when one Python library and a Grasshopper process mesh together to do wondrous things with wondrous geometry; all things that have impact, that have weight, that lean against the world, like arrows on a node-graph diagram pointing at these things. These things, I feel, are crucial.

And sometimes wanting and needing these things will constitute a decision, a decision to go this way and not that, to turn left where one could have turned right, or to walk 42.1 degrees clockwise from north where one could have, epsilon being infinitely small, theoretically had an infinite number of departures and could have ended up at an infinitely large number of places.

A flight gets lost in the world somewhere, for a good month, and for me that means that the conceptual clarity of a globe mounted on a pedestal, and the optimism of GPS and cellular networks becomes altered a little bit, modified by a sense of sheer scale, a reminder of scope and size and scale. Nothing is quite different, the volume of a sphere is still 4/3 * pi * r^3, planes still fly in great arcs across our Mercator-projection maps, accidents still happen, yes. But sometimes I am reminded of the way that mental models are so fallible; both sources of comprehension, knowledge, and misunderstanding; and that they need to be constantly adjusted, modified, re-drafted, re-designed, corrected. A plane gets lost, and hundreds of people are locked in anguish, tens of thousands of people are mobilized and strategized, and millions of people watch from all over. And in the midst of that is a plane and an event which is an entanglement of so many real factors that manages to rework our ideas of, right, of course, how large our planet can be, how much the volume of a sphere and the projected map are not contradictory, not illusory, but just one acupunctural inquiry along one section line that is neither parallel nor intersecting.

And again. This means a kind of loss, a kind of decision. All I can do is to wander on the paths necessary, and if it means that sometimes I lose travel partners, then that is so sad, but inevitable. We can still remain friends, if not travel partners, but the reason I'm traveling in the first place isn't to seek what I already knew that I wanted to find, but find things that I didn't realize I could even imagine to look for...