Between Worlds

A black hybrid car slaloms around the corner, brakes abruptly in front of me, and ejects its driver, who breathlessly mutters something about needing to contest a charge he has just incurred on the lower level of Heathrow Airport's car park. Without breaking stride, he grabs my suitcase and wheels it towards the vehicle. Relieved that my ride had finally arrived — I had been awake for around twenty-two hours by this point — I thanked him for making it, assured him not to worry about the wait, and gratefully settled into the back seat.

The journey home continues in much the same manner as it began—turbulently. We hurtle down the motorway like a small rocket, albeit one that must make sudden evasive manoeuvres. We stop. We start. We stop again. My stomach stops. And starts. And stops again. I feel sick.

Then it begins to rain.

As I take a deep breath, the driver starts singing along to Kool & the Gang on an '80s radio station:

"She's fresh! Fresh! Exciting!"

I feel as though I'm having an out-of-body experience. This girl won't be so fresh if these abrupt stops continue. Tiredness, nausea, movement — all orchestrated to '80s synth—make me wonder whether I am, in fact, dissociating from my physical body and gliding through the Elysian Fields. In an attempt to anchor myself, I try to focus on something else — anything else.

While drinking wine and watching rom-coms on the red-eye to London, one of the many things my mind turned to was the art of writing. That's right. While others slept peacefully in the surrounding seats — including, I assume from the look of their tattoos, a group of off-duty military personnel — I stayed awake.

I found myself wondering how it is possible to write about what is when it will eventually be read — by you.

What keeps me from personal writing is the slight yet significant pull towards self-censorship. It makes me hesitate where I ought to be unflinchingly fearless in committing pen to paper — or, in this case, fingers to keys. The slow clacking of a typewriter has often served as a kind of truth serum, lubricating the steady pursuit of correspondence between reality and my articulation of it.

But when it comes to writing observations and reflections, I have caught myself redirecting my words towards what I think I ought to say rather than what I actually want to say. While the is–ought distinction in moral philosophy is, to be sure, an indispensable one, it can also expose a more personal divide: the fear that what I really want to say might not be acceptable.

It's rather like the scene in Runaway Bride (sadly unavailable on my flight) in which what I want to say runs desperately after what I feel I ought to say as it speeds away in a FedEx van, resigned to becoming forever unwritten.

Do you ever feel like that?

Ernest Hemingway's oft-quoted advice to writers is to write "hard and clear about what hurts." Yet writing about pain requires a clarity of mind capable of perceiving— and faithfully conveying — what actually hurts. It is, fundamentally, a commitment to truth.

Perhaps that does not necessarily mean we must provide an account of our own sufferings. Sometimes what hurts is simply reality itself, encountered in all its glory and grit.

So I'm handing over my running shoes. The FedEx van can leave.

That, in part, is why I'm writing under a pseudonym.

I wonder whether this is what it means to live between worlds—between what is and what ought to be. Perhaps this tension is not a bug but a feature of human existence. We do not yet inhabit the fullness of what ought to be, and neither are we ever able to stand outside the stubborn immediacy of what is. The challenge, perhaps, is not to choose between the is and the ought, but to learn to inhabit the space between them faithfully, attending to the one while longing for the other.

Indeed, this car journey might serve as a fitting illustration. We move towards our destination even while the present presses itself upon us—sometimes powerfully, sometimes nauseatingly. We live between worlds, between words, between what is and what will be.

So here is my proposal.

If you give me your time, I'll give you my words.

That sounds rather grandiose, I know. Even if no one else ever reads this, I think it is still worth writing, because writing itself is an act of attending. It is my attempt to remain faithful to what is while living in the space between what is and what ought to be.

Perhaps that is enough.