Sorry about the subject line - The Unexplainability Of Experience - but I guess it fits what this article is about - something unexplainable.

I've had the outline of this article in my head for several days, without quite knowing how to make the point. It's hard to know where to begin.

When I heard of [Princess Diana's death], my mind flashed back to a day in 1981. That day in Golden Gate Park, a friend said reproachfully and with some anger that people in the Soviet Union wouldn't get to experience a world-wide moment of humanity. She was talking about the fairy-tale wedding of Prince Charles and his bride.

It upsets me that young people who are now coming into real awareness of their world can never know what living through the cold war was like, what a prision for its innocent people the Soviet Union seemed to be, and how much we as a society scorned them for it. The Soviet people were even deprived of a single, rare, blessed moment of simultaneous innocence that, for once, our whole world would get to experience.

Why does it upset me, I have been wondering. I guess it's because it represents a gulf that cannot be crossed. No one who was a child when I was a teenager can understand what it was like, then. The cold war, the Royal wedding, synth music, the "Reagan Youth". And so, this article is really an appreciation to the unexplanability experience. We all have things in our lives that others cannot understand.

"My So-Called Life", for a big example. How can anyone who hasn't seen it possibly understand? There is a little part of us that they are shut out of.

Such uncrossable gulfs of understanding are a bittersweet part of life. It's the key to why I try to be an expressive person - I try to cross the gulf, anyway. Sometimes, I think I make it across.

Only you can be you, only you can know what it was like to live through your own experiences. This cannot help but lead me to say, to myself and others, learn more from other people, judge less and listen more. Appreciate your own life. Only you can tell its story.