It's in the millions of small images that cross your path every day. The bored expression on this woman's face as she fidgets with an iPod earbud. The decisive manner in which that man there slaps his cell phone closed and curses quietly to himself, like he just lost something close to him, like he's ready to bust. That little boy with the expectant smile there playing with a ball. That shout over there. That turn of the head. That! Did you see it? That thing represents a story - one that you can't quite put your finger on. And they stream by like images across the hot beam of a film projector. Disjunct symbols, yet somehow connected. They're symbols of something that might be or could have been, or is, at this moment. But you don't exactly know the what of it. Or the why. Because those things are just out of reach. And finding them - oh god!, finding them - is hard work. And scary.

So you vow to find the thing 'someday' and you put some words in a notebook about it for future reference to yourself. But the words don't do anything - they don't even seem to be the right language. You read them to yourself and they don't make sense. They don't represent the thing you discovered. The thing that seemed real before. So you tear out the page and you write more words, thinking surely this must be closer to the thing. But when you scan them later, you discover they still miss the mark. In fact, they're further away from it. And now it's an exercise of diminishing returns. You begin to question the thing ever existed all. The further away in time you move, the harder it is to bring that thing to mind.

And so you stop trying. And that's the tragedy of it: when we stop trying to write the story. Because writing the story isn't just about writing. It's about living. And continually looking for a thing that you've only caught a glimpse of. You hope it exists - you've seen evidence that it probably does - but you just don't know it. And not knowing drives you crazy.

I spend a good part of my days searching for things. Sometimes the things are just objects. A book, a file, a document. Despite my being a pretty meticulous filer of things, I never know where the hell said thing is filed. And so the search often induces a little whirlpool of fear and paranoia deep within my gut over the fact that the thing may have been lost or thrown away. Even though I know for certain I 'filed' the freakin' thing. The problem is that there's no system to the filing. No order. I know I should keep a thing, but I hate like hell to figure out where it should be kept. Because so much commitment rests in that decision. I do not file alphabetically or by subject - too restraining. Instead, I file randomly, the same way I arrange my CD collection. And if you want to know the truth of it, the reason I'm so bad at looking for things is I begin with the premise that it is lost. I begin with a doubt over its existence. And that's a bad way to start.

So what if the thing in question is not an object at all? Most of the time it isn't, you know. Often it's something abstract. A gesture. An emotion. The reason for a tear. Or a smile. Things that give clues to the broader story: like 'love,' for instance. Like 'happiness.' Or 'sadness.' Or 'fear.' . . . Like 'success.' These are the words we use - the language, the set of symbols - for these larger ideas which, supposedly, provide meaning to our lives. And yet, the meaning of these very things is defined by other words, other symbols, that are themselves hard to pin down. Like 'money.' Like 'sex.' And so this exercise of searching is made horribly complicated and unstable.

It's not that I hate the search. I hate anticipating the search, and wondering if I'll even know a thing when I find it. And that's the crux of it, isn't it? That something may or may not even be there. The Great White Whale. The thing you spend your life pursuing. What if it isn't even there to begin with? What if you painstakingly peel back all the layers, getting closer and closer, and find - in the end - nothing. Whiteness.

FDR was close about that fear thing. Fear can be a 'nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.' But I don't think the great fear is the fear itself. I think the great fear is nothing. The great fear is that all this stuff we occupy our time with - all this running around, all these words - it's all nothing more than running around, nothing more than meaningless symbols. What if there's no greater significance to it all than that? That's the awful, gut-twisting thought we try like hell to avoid. And to not be paralyzed by it, we have to spend our lives trying to prove it wrong.

But I think it's different for some people. The question of whether or not a thing is there makes no sense to them. These are the people who know exactly where a document can be found. These are people who, when you question them on whether or not a thing is there, they reply, of course it is there. It's there because it was there yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. I've always known it was there. And when I open up this little box here that I've kept by my bedside all these years, this little box my parents gave me, and their parents before them, when I open it up . . . see? There it is. It's still there. I can look at it and touch it and even pick it up, turn it around, and view it from all angles. And there's nothing more to it than that. It is something, you see? It's the what and the why.

Sometimes, man, I wish I had that.

Other times, I'm really glad I don't.

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