A Riddle of Time
A brief apology for being so absent and sporadic and random with my unsystematic posting but…due to an eventful, active, and on-the-go life here in Chile, I don’t allow myself to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put my words down on paper as much as I should. That being said, I made time to write about my past weekend of hiking and camping, as I believe it to be one of my most prized experiences yet.
To be on the road means life holds some essence of destination, that life expects there to be movement from within you, a shift of time and matter from present to future. A travel, a journey, an experience, are all products of time; Time as a composition of earthly and cosmic turns, as an unattainable concept that we strive to perfect. So, if time is created by man, is socially constructed, and is as abstract as abstract seems to get, how does it seem to dictate and shape every aspect of living. Time is thrown away, laughed off, ostracized, and shoved into the corner. Simply taken advantage of. Yet, time is an obsession, a daily regiment, the global dictator whose reign is adamant and always demanding. It relays and regulates every millisecond of our every single day, yet we seem to be both over-aware and ignorant of its concept and its ever-lurking presence. It’s the elephant in the room that many do not seem to accept with full awareness and recognition. We have a sense of living time, of human time, of constant earthly time, beating in seconds, minutes, hours, turning into days, months, years. Yet every single one of these is limited. Each one is both a miniscule and a grandiose representation of our tread upon earth, of the effective sinking of our footprints into the soil, whether it be in forward or backward motion.We expectantly project into the future and hesitantly reach deeply back into our past, believing both will help us in our current situation. Yet we don’t seem to allow ourselves to focus on the beating time occurring at the fleeting moment of our current situation. If the Now is disregarded, neglected, simply overlooked, are we then solely living for the future, or simply living in our past? What happens, then, when the Now is all we live for, is all we believe to be relevant?
In reverence to this, September 24th, 25th, and 26th were impeccable paradigms of moving simply and willingly with the ebb and flow of life’s unpredictability and passage of time. It was three of us dropped on the side of a dirt road—one with trickling traffic, mind you—with hiking packs in tact and thumbs greeting passing cars in hopes of meeting a willing soul. After 22 minutes, 57 seconds, and 15 cars, a cloud of dust shrouded us as a truck pulled off the road and aided the first leg of our trek up the mountain. We met willing souls for three days straight, riding in the beds of numerous pick-ups, and hitchhiking our way up, down, in, and out of the national park. We waded through glacier water, stumbled upon a rock beach island forward-facing a cascading waterfall, napping in the beating rays with the cataract exploding at our toes. We camped directly next to the rushing river, the sun setting low on the rapids, the sound of tires on gravel road, the beam of intermittent headlights, and the stars opening up the sky through the tree line profiles—like perforations in black paint—once nightfall hit. We used discarded aluminum cans to boil water for dinner over our campfire flames, we snuggled up with hot stones in our sleeping bags and tent, and we continuously paused in awe over the idyllic spread of landscape that was panned out before our very eyes.
No plan, just a leap of faith into the arms of time.
To truly make the most of the time that is given unto us, do we simply find a balance between over-awareness and ignorance? How is it that we can simply master an art of timely equilibrium?