No, I am not living in a virtual world where you pay with Linden dollars, and I do not intend joining Second Life in the future.
Still, I sometimes do have the feeling of living two different lives. In my first life I go to work, chat with my neighbours, go shopping … My second life is about this website and everything connected to it.
And although I am not hiding this second life, - I told my friends about it (some are no longer friends), my colleagues have seen me on TV at the pro-American demonstration in Mainz (and they were shocked), and I have my full address on the website`s imprint, - I feel the gap between these two lives broadening every day. And it is getting more and more difficult to get from one side to the other. Sometimes I feel like standing at the edge of a huge canyon, staring down, and I fear one day I will fall into this canyon when trying to get from one side to the other. Then again, I see myself very small at the foot of one of these mountains trying to push them together, a vain effort, of course, even more absurd than what this Greek guy was trying to do.
And lately, I have seen myself stuck on one side of the canyon, the other side being so far away that crossing was no longer possible – and I badly hoped being on the right side … for as President Masaryk so rightly said:
That conviction alone is enough to make a life beautiful and what tends to be called happy.
The first time I heard these words was back in summer 1992 in kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, a kibbutz named after exactly this first President of Czechoslovakia, and now, what a coincidence, I have just rediscovered them on the RFE/RL website in a speech held by Thomas Dine, the former President of this institution “10th Anniversary Remarks”, Prague, Czech Republic, September 3, 2005.
These are the moments in life when you have the feeling that so far separate pieces of your life come together as one. And I like that feeling.