Stephen Witherden’s Website :: Photos :: All experience is an arch

All experience is an arch

This is a road we travelled on a little while back. We decided to travel slightly South-East of Auckland. Click the image for a large version. It’s worth it!

Anyway, I was feeling really frustrated today, I guess this yes/no hot/cold Texas business has affected me more than I want to believe. I can literally feel the tension in my body. My nose started threatening to twitch again, something I am valiantly resisting. I used to suffer from a nervous twitch in high school which earned me the endearing nickname “hampster”.

I have started feeling listless again, because I feel a state of inertia setting in again and I don’t like it. My performance review is coming up and I have started to really consider my self-actualisation achievements. I realised: I want to learn new stuff, I want to grow! Tennyson said it better than I could, in one of my favourite poems Ullyses:

Yet all experience is an arch wherthrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make and end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Words so beautiful, I want to cry! It appeals to the existentialist in all of us.

4 Responses to “All experience is an arch”

1. Sally Says:
   May 11th, 2006 at 9:52 pm

   Where is that road?

   Hmm… I think most people would be able to understand your frustration. I mean, it takes a bit of courage to move to a different country to work… when you have no relies and friends over there… Sure working for the same company, but people in there are diff.. a whole new culture and new life.

   Now after you’ve prepared yourself for that, rush around to get everything sorted… luckily haven’t told the landlord you are moving yet…

   Then… it’s like, oh you may not go… becoz of that silly citizenship. I mean, if they had tell you a few more months ahead.. then maybe they could have worked something out earlier!

   ^^;;;

   And why would Nz Govt make it faster so they can lose one of their own talent (or talent to be - as a citizen to be) to overseas? You might like the cowboys there and never come back?!

   Anyways… selfishly, it’d be nice to have you around more often. But I think even I feel a little frustrated with what’s happening there… let alone you.

   hopefully it will all turn out fine

2. Dad Says:
   May 18th, 2006 at 9:58 am

   I recognised that road strait away. We have also traveled down there several times. realy beautiful!

   It looks as though we stopped at the exact same spot to take photos!

3. stephen Says:
   May 20th, 2006 at 12:05 am

   That road was just outside Kaiaua

   I am sure everything will work out for the best

4. stephen Says:
   May 20th, 2006 at 12:06 am

   Knowing how similar we are, I can completely believe that we’d stop at the very same place and take a picture, Dad. It’s still kind of uncanny though.