As I drove from Ames to the Channel 13 newsroom in Des Moines, the vast plains of Iowa terrain showed the best of its October gold. SUVs passed compacts as they flew down the highway with destiny unknown. America seemed untouchable. America seemed peaceful.

The airwaves slowly brought me back to reality. The signal of NPR with the latest breaking news on the attacks promotionally denominated “America Strikes Back” were on.

Many times I have tried to exercise some kind of transcendental meditation that would allow me to experience other people’s thoughts, lives. It is a feeling that leaves you estranged from your own reality, but at the same time and contradictorily enough, it stems to bring you back to reality.

You just try to picture yourself in that other person’s body and ask yourself how does he or she view the same scene you are watching from his/her perspective. You try to come up with a schema of how this person’s life is, what are her/his dreams, his frustrations, his dilemmas.

I must confess this brief interlude comes from a total ignorance in whatever it is the Tibet monks accomplish through their meditational exercises, but I think as long as you are a human being you are entitled to welcome all these experiences. But mine, to be perfectly clear, is some kind of amateur intent to achieve a minimal level of understanding of the cosmos.

For a moment, I just wanted to be in an Afghan mother’s body, in a Palestinian child’s skin, in a Chechnian father’s mind.

I must say that for the first time I felt that we were not untouchable, that we were not invincible. The force may be with us. The difference now is a prevalent sense of loss. The loss of the thought that we, Americans, will be left forever unharmed.

Still, what we are going through now is a crumb of the bread of fear. This is the everyday meal that has been fed to different people all around the world throughout contemporary history.

Some male friends of mine argue that women should not rule government because they are led by their emotions. I agree only with the last part of this statement.

Maybe the world would be better off with governments led by mothers that would not want their kids to go to war. Because after all, if we try to come up with a logic out of all this madness, at the end we will be left with the same anger, destruction, and hopelessness. Only by that time it would have changed latitudes.

Nonetheless, at this moment we are presented with a breach, there’s a crack in the rock, a window of opportunity for all of us to experience the constant fear of war. Ironically, that might be the way to finally unite us. We will no longer be isolated; we will be able to share the pain and the anxiety for the first time.

I snapped out of my cosmological delusion as I approached my parking spot.

Hmmm . “That car seems suspicious.” “How tall is the tower next to us?” Thoughts of caution, of a newly raised mental signage that reads: “Danger, you are joining the rest of the world.”

The real world is not an MTV series.

Reality is definitely not a new kind of TV show where crew members struggle to survive while taking adventurous vacations from their real lives. Reality is rather brutal.

Still, it is infinitely beautiful in the simplest kind of ways, at times.

Zayira Jordan is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Hato Rey, Puerto Rico.