Editor's Report

Preparing for a journey to an unknown destination challenges us to be in two psychic time zones simultaneously. Ticking back and forth between the here-and-now of daily life and planning for an unknown future can result in a kind of mental jet lag, leaving us feeling temporally off-kilter. What a relief to finally arrive at an airport or railroad terminal, which, like an airlock, permits escape from the habituated present into uncharted terrain. Something beckons us to seek experiences of disorientation that encourage disruptions in identity and time and memory.

A traveler to rural China talked about visiting a home in the countryside where an older couple lived with their coffins. The traveler expressed confusion and wonder. The image, living and dying positioned side by side, is dreamlike. For the elder couple, the close proximity of life to death was probably experienced as ordinary fact; the traveler, however, was altered by the collision of ideas. Contact with the novel and unfamiliar uproots us from ourselves, turning our gaze inward and reacquainting us with a sensitivity to experience that is invariably lost through daily routine.

Babies get a look on their faces, something like rapture, when experiencing first discoveries, things that seem beyond belief about themselves and the world. Meltzer (2005) describes such early states as “the shock of both panic and ecstasy” (p. xvii). I imagine a combination of vividness and the weird. It's unusual to see an adult with that look, which is both understandable and sad because we all know that life is more than a little weird, and having the capacity to experience a bit more of that might help bring about greater richness in our lives. But, adult experience is about embracing the idea that meaning making and higher-level mental representations give life a knowable structure at the expense of contact with bodily and perceptually based sensations and states. Apparently, we can't have it both ways.

It's fortunate that a ca