It's so weird. When I leave a place, especially if it's really far overseas, (like on the other side of the planet) it really feels like it stops existing. I'm not there, so it can't be there either. It's hard for me to imagine billions of people going about their daily lives.... without me. I can imagine, maybe, that there are people in San Francisco today walking around doing stuff. I can comprehend their existence. But to think of Delhi, Baku, London, Harare, Mexico City, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Baghdad, Istanbul, Oslo, St. Petersburg...... All those people, all those lives, all those conversations, expressions, feeling of emotions, the will to live and succeed. All of them. And just one of me.

I was looking at Google Earth on my computer today, revisiting some old haunts in Baku, Azerbaijan. I was strangely surprised to see everything still there. I found the apartment I lived in, the roads we used to walk, the McDonalds, the green tiled mosque. I found myself muttering, it's still there, everything is still there. Today, right now, life in Baku goes on....

But I'm here, a million miles away. How can they both exist?
It completely overloads me.

Since I'm not God, I think it's natural to not understand the scope of 7 billion people, it's natural for the world at large to sort of become surreal. But I'm not sure it's the best thing. A surreal world leads to surreal poverty in Africa, it leads to a surreal war in Iraq, surreal suffering, surreal pain, death, starvation, sickness. So surreal that I sit in the comfort of my home and forget that the world beyond my little corner of life really, actually, firmly exists.