sushi, diversity, and soul cravings

Today over miso soup and bento boxes, I listened to a friend who is also waiting to hear back about an application, also feeling the need for some kind of change in order to avoid stagnation, even though he doesn’t want to abandon the roots and growth he has here in Greensboro.
He wants to get a PhD in American Studies from Yale, and he shared with me parts of his application, the most striking of which is his “diversity statement”. One: my friend is brilliant. Two: he is a poet, so even his prose is powerful. Three: although the program for which he is applying is labeled American Studies, his ideas are all about finding that ‘new humanity’ I long for, and therefore are less American and more Humanity Studies. And we arrive back at ontology: the study of BEING: transcendent of nationality, ethnicity, culture, education, ability, and given names.
I’ve been thinking of stepping outside of my context lately, and I’m sticking my big toe out into that river, so see what happens.
Being white, I am perhaps lagging behind many of my fellow twenty-somethings (and even younger people) in the struggle of discovering where I fit in (or don’t) to the racial/cultural lines that have been drawn and into which we are all born. Nate’s studies and thoughts lead him away from racial labels. By his standards he is not ‘black’ or necessarily ‘African-American’, since those terms suggest a specific cultural identity and also ignore the multiple facets of his past. He points out that he has European and Native American blood along with the African lineage from which he inherited his skin and features. His “white” ancestors’ heritage and family histories did not cease to exist when they joined with people of darker skin. So why, then, did their children lose the right to claim the family trees on both sides? Why have science and society and history been allowed to declare who we are instead of letting us define ourselves? Why do we seek to divide ourselves when the human soul longs for utopia? We have more in common than not.
I’ve previously written that I think a sign of maturity is realizing that others are just as multi-dimensional as I. That when I walking up the sidewalk and pass a small work-crew, they are having a separate conversation that has nothing to do with me, and their thoughts about me begin and end with the Southern ritual “How’re ya doing?” and my impersonal response. That six billion plus people do not all exist to fulfill my needs. That people are not a drug for my ego or, going deeper, for my soul. And that when I try to use them as such, the soul hit* doesn’t last very long. The brief satisfaction it brings me to think that I am occupying some important mental and emotional space for a perfect stranger does not make me need the next person any less. Thus, I discover the insatiable appetite of my soul. Created to find identity outside of ourselves, we latch on to whatever makes us feel better. We can turn to temporary solutions, or abandon them for a true infinite**.
One difficulty is that we must abandon them again and again, when we awake, before we doze off, while cooking dinner, at work or on the commute. And sometimes we have to say goodbye to a good thing in order to keep it from going stale. Or maybe we have to fast from something that we enjoy in order to "leave room for longing," as Nate said it -- to remind our bodies that the soul needs more nourishment than physical food, entertainment, or relations.


*term used by my pastor on Sunday; not sure if he coined it or not
**after C.S. Lewis (constantly quoted by my pastor)… “the sweet poison of the false infinites”