I’ve just now returned home from a long and exciting and difficult trip, and I’m reminded of a passage I greatly love from this book which concerns transition:
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Colin Turnbull, in his marvellous accounting of the Mbuti peoples of Zaire, passes along to us their understanding of the dangers in transition. The Mbuti see the person as being in the center of a sphere. In moving from here to there, the sphere moves too and offers protection. If movement in time or space is too sudden or vehement, we risk the danger of reaching the boundaries of the sphere too quickly, before the center has time to catch up. When this happens, a person becomes wazi-wazi, or disoriented and unpredictable. If you pierce through the safe boundaries of the sphere into the other world, you risk letting in something else which takes your place. If the Mbuti know of and guard against such violent and sudden motion ~ and that without the experience of automobiles or jet planes ~ what do we, the so-called civilized people of the world, know of our transitions in space and time? I think we are a whole society in a state of wazi-wazi, beside ourselves, and possessed by imposter selves.
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I’d say I’m in a state of wazi-wazi right at the moment. I think I’ll go read the rest of the chapter while soaking in a hot tub.