Some thoughts from our son Marcel, closely tied to his Vipassana meditation experiences over these past few months:

Confucius said that "a journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single step," which leads me to wonder today whether the longest journey of all might not begin and end without taking a single step. Driving the Mexico City-Toluca highway, I laugh to myself at the speed limit: 80 km/h. The speedometer on the average car tops out around 180 km/h. Is that fast or slow? Then I think: maybe what matters isn't the speed at which I'm traveling, but where I'm headed. Sure, I'm headed to the supermarket, but what about my life? Where am I moving in the internal landscape of my own existence? I look around. It's common knowledge that a jet travels at about 800 km/h, a spacecraft at 28,000, and so on, while human beings conquer velocity and dream of one day traveling at the speed of light (maybe faster). But do we actually know where we're going? This isn't a new question. Henry Miller was asking it nearly half a century ago, and the Zen masters, perhaps more than two millennia before that. All the great prophets asked it too, a thought that most of them eventually set aside in the course of their proselytizing, once they realized that for most people tangible distance is far more interesting than psychic depth. Perhaps knowledge of the external world is less dangerous than knowledge of the internal one. The answer is uncertain. What I can say with certainty is that we live in a society obsessed with understanding the outer world, at every scale. The electron microscope can focus on a single atom and the Hubble telescope spots the most distant galaxies. Meanwhile, the answer to existential questions sits closer and more available to people than any of that. It's not a matter of better understanding the human brain, or glimpsing the secret of synaptic firing. It requires no great financial investment, no skill with complex instruments. The question is more open-ended, and closer to home.

I walk into any bookstore and on the vast "self-help" shelf I find hundreds, maybe thousands, of books with recipe-style titles written by psychologists, family therapists, sect leaders, and assorted "knowers of the soul's secrets," their names carrying the implicit endorsement of popular brands of homemade chocolate. Leafing through them, I realize the titles and the names aren't so far from the actual contents. One writer is anxious about finding misplaced dairy products; another wonders whether the answer to the mystery of human existence might lie in a healthy, vegetarian, organic diet. And then I laugh again, wondering whether these low-calorie writers really think us so limited as to compare our highest aspirations to a slice of gruyère. Beyond the superficial constructs, I ask myself: is the solution to life found in seven steps (by which point I will have become a highly effective person along the way)? As I said before, maybe it's found right here. Here and now, because does the "there" and the "before" really exist beyond the here and now? Which leads to the next question: how do you raise serious questions about existence and the deep psychic content of being human today without sounding like a box of cloying sweets or a dietary warning label?

In response to my original question, more and more questions arise, and no answers. Looking out at the world from the edge of the existential abyss, which is more dangerous: to leap into the unknown and risk falling forever, or slamming into a hard and very real floor, or to turn around and run in the opposite direction as fast as your legs will carry you? In my case, I think the only solution is to leap inward, to unfold myself and return, like an inquisitive spiral, to the origin from which I set out. Only then, I propose, can we hope to know more about what we actually want. It's easy enough for many of us to claim that we want what we desire, but do we know whether we really desire what we want? For some, a comfortable uncertainty may be easier to accept than the sometimes hard certainty that comes with knowing what you truly desire. And yet we consume enormous quantities of psychic energy in that constant deception, in the lie of living an acceptable life instead of a desired one. I propose the necessity of a journey inward in order to set sail outward. I propose that perhaps when we learn to see what constitutes us, what drives us, that two-dimensional inquisitive spiral moves into three dimensions, becoming the spring that propels us toward a more gratifying external life, a clearer vision of the road, and of that journey, which we can now, finally, begin with a first step, because we know what we desire. And then, as if setting out on a Sunday walk that is also an adventure, we weigh anchor, raise our sails, and sail before the wind, out beyond whatever it is we can make out on our horizon.

Marcel Ventosa