In the moment

Glacier Peak and Image Lake

How had I allowed myself to become so busy?  How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?
--Margaret Renki (New York Times)

We had hiked all day in rain the day before, climbing higher and higher above the Suiattle River in the North Cascades.  At six thousand feet, we had put up our tents in the rain, eaten dinner in the rain, and gone to sleep in the rain.  But when I awoke the next morning the sun was shining.

This was  1968, and the start of my first weeklong backpacking trip.  Jim (the same Jim with whom I hiked in Cornwall last month) and his friend Jason had been backpacking together since high school, so I felt very much the newbie.  I slipped out of the tent.  I marveled.  Where the day before there had been only clouds and swirling fog, this morning I was greeted by Image Lake, reflecting the image of Glacier Peak.

My friends were still asleep.  No one else was camped within sight or sound.  The air was crystal clear.  The birds were hopping around and singing with enthusiasm.  And the mountain seemed to have materialized magically out of nowhere.  I was exhilarated.  It was, as they say, a transcendent moment.  We had a long day of hiking ahead of us, but I was in no hurry to begin, or even to eat breakfast.

In the years that followed, I engaged in many backpacking excursions -- some a week long, some merely overnight.  I enjoyed a lot of beautiful scenery.  But I almost always was "goal-oriented" -- I had set myself a destination to reach, a peak that I was to climb, a number of miles I was to tramp.  The scenery was always there, and I certainly didn't ignore it.  But smelling the roses was a by-product of the hike, not its purpose or my major activity. Like a marathon runner, I was often too busy competing with myself, and achieving my goals, to meditate on what I was running through.

In Cornwall last month, I suspect that Jim -- like me -- was still goal-oriented.  Let's get to the B&B as soon as possible, was our silent mantra.  I found myself envying John, a geologist who was always ready to stop and examine both the terrain and individual rocks.  And Ann and Dorothy, whose knowledge and love of plants and flowers became obvious.  And I remember a relative, a physician, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of ornithology -- observing and identifying birds always fascinates him.

And then I read Margaret Renki's column in today's Times, lamenting how her life seemed one big rush to accomplish projects.  She had forced herself to take time to return to her home town to attend a funeral.  While there, she wandered about her old neighborhood, and pondered how much less harried and more enjoyable her life had been in her youth.

I found the place at the end of the road where rusted tracks emerged from the weeds, the exact place where my father had waited for his father to step off the trolley after work. I found the creek where my eighth-grade boyfriend first held my hand. I named to myself all the neighbors who had once lived on my street, every one of them gone now, as a scent drifted on the air that I couldn’t place. Then, finally: gardenia! It blooms in profusion in my hometown but not at all in Nashville, where I have lived for 32 years.

Well, sure, you say.  Everyone is nostalgic for childhood.  So what?  But this meant more than nostalgia for Margaret.  It was the trigger that revealed how, since childhood, she had lived more and more in her head and in the future, concerned with goals and things to be accomplished.  She lived less and less in the present, noticed less and less the people and places about her.

I don't have to be a geologist or a botanist or an ornithologist to live in the present -- although it can help.  I just need to be observant, to think about what I see, to marvel at nature and to marvel at the amazing diversity and complexity I see in the people about me.  I need to feel more and intellectualize less.  In fact, I might even find it useful to enjoy an experience without wondering how it can be converted into a blog entry!

Because, in Ms. Renki's words

I’ve recognized the reach of mortality for the better part of five decades. It is always hurtling toward us faster than spring turns into summer on a southbound highway. Faster than a sapling becomes a shade tree and a house becomes someone else’s home. Faster than a newborn baby becomes a man. And yet I conduct my life as though I have all the time in the world, filling my days in ways I can’t always account for when evening falls.

"Stop and smell the roses" is a tired cliché.  But a useful cliché.  Reminding us that whether we fill our days with questionably important goals to be accomplished or with rich experiences to be savored, time still passes, day by day.  Extra years aren't for sale.  But we can all use the ones we have in ways that are more satisfying.

Like watching the sunlight move slowly across the different ridges on Glacier Peak.