Steph Davis
My watch is a curious object. The alarm beeps in the dark and I go to make coffee. Or it beeps in the dark and I've just returned from 20 hours of motion back to my sleeping bag at Base Camp. Or it beeps as I'm an hour into crunching up snowfields, or it beeps when I'm cooking dinner. It's dreamlike, seemingly random. There is no order. I need it though, the watch, because sometimes I want to know what date I'm supposed to be in.
"Time! Time!!" the Hobbit squeaked in terror, as Gollum demanded an answer to his riddle. Time was what he was begging for and it was also the answer that saved his life. I think of the Hobbit as I hike up the steep hill to the lake in the dark. My mind fastens onto the word, repeats it with each footstep. Time. Time. Time.
Three more weeks here is starting to seem like not enough. But it also seems like too much. Gone are thoughts of pushing it on short rock climbs, improving daily, being on a nice logical training schedule. Eating breakfast in the morning, going to sleep at night. What have I achieved, precisely, in this almost two months in Patagonia? My culture and my background teach me to Set Goals and Achieve Them. Patagonia laughs.
"Minutes pass, or are they hours?" Kurt Diemberger asks dreamily, recalling an early ascent in the Alps. What is this thing we call time? Jorge Luis Borges, the brilliant Argentine writer, spent years of his life reflecting on the problem. "I do not pretend to know what sort of thing time is—or even if it is a 'thing'—but I feel that the passage of time and time itself are a single mystery and not two." And in a different, even more mystical mindframe, he wrote, "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
How can an hour be so different? I thought, was taught, that it is a unit of measurement. Dependable, like an ounce or a meter. Something that is reliable and the same, a yardstick to measure my world. But we all know that an hour spent with a loved one bears no resemblance to an hour spent in a stiff chair at an interminable meeting. Now, I'm not even sure what an hour means. Is it the wind that has erased all that I thought I once knew?
"I used to be respectable and chaste and stable, but who can stand in this strong wind and remember those things?" Rumi asks. "The same wind that uproots trees makes the grasses shine. The lordly wind loves the weakness and the lowness of grasses. Never brag of being strong. Wind destroys and wind protects. There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheikh."
Here in Patagonia, I learn what Sufi mystics have known since the thirteenth century. And what people have known for even longer—"it was only the first night, but a number of centuries had already preceded it," Rafael Carsinos Assens writes cryptically in the Talmudic anthology. And Marcus Aurelius: "Remember that all things turn and turn again in the same orbits, and for the spectator it is the same to watch for a century or two or infinitely."
Infinity and time, like rappel ropes, have been irretrievably tangled into each other by the wind. I feel that I glimpse the snarl, but can only pluck futilely at a few loops before the wind snatches the whole ball away from me again. Why am I here? What is the point of my presence? What difference would it make if I were somewhere else, and not hiking up and down hills in these alleged "hours" of my existence? I begin to wonder if I do exist? The wind sweeps my mind bare.
Rumi says,
"If you want what visible reality
can give, you're an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you'll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love's confusing joy.
Gamble everything for love,
if you're a true human being.
If not, leave
this gathering.
Half-heartedness doesn't reach
into majesty. You set out
to find God, but then you keep
stopping for long periods
at mean-spirited roadhouses.
In a boat down a fast-running creek,
it feels like trees on the bank
are rushing by. What seems
to be changing around us
is rather the speed of our craft
leaving this world."
"So the sea journey goes on and on," he says,
"and who knows where! Just to be held
by the ocean is the best luck we could have."
—
Steph Davis, MountainZone.com Correspondent
