Laying in bed last night, scrolling back through albums on my iPhone, seeing photos from that epic bicycle trip that ended not so long ago, I felt almost as if it Never Happened. Or that I dreamed it. But there are videos and pictures and this very blog and so it must have happened. Somehow very tangible things turn to vapor as they recede into the past—you reach out to grab at them and all you touch is a whisper. Its very strange. We barrel forward, and the days turn to weeks and the weeks into a month and then, SIGH…. things become The Past.
Learning to enjoy the intangible is a hard thing for a materialist like me. Sunsets, for example. Sunsets = desperation. You can’t capture a sunset—it evades all attempts to remember it. You want to eat it, taste it, freeze it, wrap it up in a box, HAVE IT, but—of course, the terrible beauty of a sunset is that you cannot do any of these things. And forget trying to photograph it all together. It exists, and is gone and you go on. You surrender to witnessing it, watching it change before your eyes so s l o w l y, taking it in; I believe we call this An Experience. We experience it. We cannot keep it. THAT is incredibly beautiful, and I’m more than aware of that, but still it doesn’t completely satisfy me. I want the feeling to go on forever.
That’s a little how I feel about our bicycle trip. Its escaping me right now, and try as I did to put it down on screen and paper, its just not happening at this very moment and I have to learn to enjoy its new status as something that happeND. I say this wistfully, not woefully. All things have their time....sigh.
