Day 30: Space, the Final Frontier?

I, in the matter of one week, have found myself on 4 different flights, two long train rides, and 5 different countries. Yet, my life that its purposiveness spread out across 3 different continents seems to have left me jaded to the ‘jet setting’ life style some say I have come to lead. It is, without a doubt, a marvel that I can one day I can wake up in a small town in India and be in London, the cosmopolitan capital of the world, by dinner time. My 10 hour flight covers thousand of kilometers, but the space the that I travel is so much more than physical distance. It is a social space. A type of space saturated with life and culture, with ancient history and our present modernity all unfolding in the same moment.This space is not concerned with the objective dimensions determined by positive sciences, rather its determined by the subjectivity that inherently gives space its meaning. That is to say, yes objective space gives us dimensions, but the space that I truly travel on my flight, that space created through the subjective, gives objective notions of space its meaning and significance. By the time I arrive in London, I have not only traveled some thousand odd kilometers but I have transcended the geographical social structure of the world. What kind of space is this? There is not just kilometers between India and London; there is an entire world in between them, an entire cultural world, kilometers of cultural space. This world, I speak of is not some mental phenomenon and we should not speak of it as though it were any less accurate than the physical distance we can measure. When it comes to my practical everyday life, how often do I actually measure distance anyways? Aren’t things more accurately measured as “a stones throw away” or “just around the corner”. In our everyday, space seems to concern us more through our experience of it rather than our empirical studies of it.

All this traveling has left me quite confused on the matter of space. I’ve learned, its not reducible to distance, which could be thought of the space of the physical world. But what about our lives? What is that space that determines the life we live? And as if our subjective lives weren’t enough, think of what a virtual selves could reorient this space….

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