The Quest

Earlier today I had a leisurely lunch with a girlfriend of mine at this great Thai restaurant in West L. A. (West Pico & Midvale) called Chilli Thai. They serve this spectacularly savory, flavory duck salad that I always inevitably end up ordering whenever I go there. So if you’re ever at the Landmark on Pico (just NE of where the San Diego & Santa Monica FWYs intersect), then I recommend you stop by and drop in for a lite bite to complement your movie-going experience.

While waiting for our meal, we engaged in our usual casual conversation, updating eachother on the latest goings-on in our hectic and harried lives. As the tide of our discourse gradually rose, the ebb and flow of our conversation eventually flooded over into more personal matters of discussion. But before it did, and as I was in the midst of delivering a monologue on the difference between writing (the automatic act of putting pen to paper) and composition (the experiential process of creating something new), she asked me rhetorically yet pointedly: “So now I know the difference, but what’s the difference?”

As innocent and innocuous as this question was meant to be, it forced me to finally consider the significance of what I’m doing pursuing a graduate degree at my age with all of my “issues,” especially considering all of the seemingly more important, pressing and immediate demands for my time and attention. So sailing southbound on the San Diego freeway, a lone vessel in a violent sea of tumultuous traffic, I meditated – my mind occasionally drifting elsewhere as it typically does – on the one-word question I likely started asking long before I could actually even ask it: “Why?” (Who cares … What’s the différence anyway?...)

Though I may never arrive at the safe harbor of a concrete, conclusive response to this question (and even if I did, such a destination would only invite a thousand more journeyed whys), I can accept – however tentatively and provisionally – that…

Poseidon promises what Neptune now knows.

Huh? What does this mean?

It means that I’ll never know. I’ll never really know the answer to this question, nor to all the other countless questions that I’ve ever asked; nevertheless, I must (and I will) continue to ask them: to ask them of others and to ask them of myself.

For in the question begins the quest, and as long as I’m sailing, I cannot sink.

02-02-2011