Sand through the hourglass

We pass through time like someone walking through a swarm of mayflies:  The moments come so thick that we hardly notice them dropping around us, and we can't imagine they will ever be gone.  …
We are contiguous with everything that is gone.  We are history.  This moment is already over.
--Sam Anderson (New York Times Magazine)

It is 11:20 a.m. in Seattle.  The temperature is 47 degrees.  The sun is shining; the air is crisp and cold; people walk by my house wearing warm jackets and gloves.  I see one such person being dragged along by a dog on a leash, a large dog wearing a large, warm sweater.  The temperature is forecast to reach a maximum of 52 degrees by 2 p.m.  By then, I will have gone for a walk under autumn leaves.

It is 2:20 a.m. Monday in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  The temperature is 75 degrees.  It is dark and cloudy, and most people are asleep.  The temperature is forecast to reach 85 degrees by 2 p.m..  Showers are forecast all day; it's the tail-end of the monsoon season.

One week from this moment, I will be almost an hour into a twelve-hour flight to Seoul, where I will change planes for a six hour flight to Chiang Mai.  Drinks will have been offered.  I probably will have declined, puritanically concerned about adjusting my circadian rhythms.  I'll accept wine with dinner.

Eighteen hours after that proffered drink, I will arrive in Chiang Mai.  It will be 10 p.m. Monday evening.  The temperature will be about 76 degrees.  I will be greeted by my sister and her son at the airport, and whisked off to her rental home.

By the time I'm in bed that night, I will be not only physically in Chiang Mai, but mentally as well.  It will be nearly midnight Monday night, and the temperature will be in the mid-70s.  I will no longer be in Seattle.  Supposedly, it will be 9 a.m. Monday morning in Seattle, and the temperature will be somewhere around 40 degrees.  But that will not be my world.  Not my reality.  That will be the world of a different place.  And a different time.

My world will be warm and dark.  I will go happily to sleep, eager to re-explore Chiang Mai in the morning, a morning when I'll be wearing shorts and a t-shirt, not jeans and a sweater.

As Sam Anderson suggests, the "today" in which I'm now writing will be history.  This moment, writing in this blog, is in fact over even as I write.  And Seattle itself will be over, finis, kaput, next week.  Just one portion of the mayflies through which I have swum throughout my life, albeit a large portion.  And a portion of that swarm to which I must return two weeks later. 

I will return to it two weeks later, and feel a slight surprise as my train carries me from Sea-Tac airport to Husky Stadium near my home, a ride during which I'll see how little has changed since I left.  A few minor changes, perhaps, as though the "Seattle" set had been hastily reconstructed for my arrival, so hastily reconstructed that a few inaccuracies had escaped the eyes of the workmen. 

But I'll be back.  As though I had never left.  Chiang Mai will move on, so they try to persuade me, undisturbed by both my coming and my going.  But to me it will have been dismantled and stored, awaiting my hoped-for return. 

And I'll be in Seattle once again.  With only photographs to persuade me that my memory matched reality, that I had in fact, for a short time, dwelt in another world.