Me, two years old. Hands pressed against the window. Perhaps my earliest word, Outside, repeated. Gazing, longing, yearning.
Outside, Outside, Outside...
What did this fledgling person mean? What exactly did I long for. Is this the longing I still feel?
I feel it in finishing a book. In the inevitable moment of abandonment; the reader left behind. In Tolkien's Middle Earth I am left sobbing, sinking, standing, on the shores of the Grey Havens. Tears streaming, watching my beloved friends sailing to an Undying land; a land I cannot visit. I am forever here with hands pressed against the pane of that last page and yearning for outside.
This is the longing of a littler me. For my own Undying Land, and the turn of another page.
I've come to see that our beloved characters are not alone in traveling to an eternally unknown future. We humans are also travelers to that unknown land. We are a species of time travelers; blessed tick by tock to trek. Each of us has a personal outside; our own journey to the future, informed by the past, and experienced in the present.
The Journy
It is said that one person cannot step into the same river twice. For one, the water is ever running away; and for second, each step changes the person.