Pleasently Abandoned at 15,000ft
I wake up and I’m alone. Cradled by a brief plateau perched along a winding mountain ridge, I awake to Nanda Devi staring back at me, a peak that was at one time the tallest mountain in the world. At first, I don’t measure the consequences. Eight days from the nearest road, I find myself entertained by the butterfly circling me before a calving glacier pushes my field of vision back into the larger canvas. The butterfly doesn’t seem to mind what role it plays in the picture, amusing itself in the wind. As I let my lens recalibrate, the shapes in the snow across the valley play tricks on me. Clouds tip-toeing around the valley below as if they’re sneaking out at night. In other contexts, their imposing shade of grey would be a warning, but here they feel more like equals. You’d expect 40 days in the Himalayas to make you one with nature but flicking that bug off my pants never felt so good.
The view
As my stomach settles and brain releases from the grips of acute mountain sickness, it starts to sink in. I'm very alone. 2000 feet above America's highest point, the body forgets how to function. So the team decided it would be best to leave me behind and come back for me. Half conscious I heard them discuss tying me to a rock just in case, but decided I wasn’t worth the effort. Altitude doesn’t work on humor.
After a quick inventory of my water bottle and spotting a creak nearby I know I’ll be fine, I tell myself they’ll come down eventually. My loneliness quickly turned to relief, when was the last time I was truly alone? Phoneless, I was stripped of all agency, for once unable to act on my every thought. Helplessness would usually be anxiety inducing, yet stripped of all autonomy, it feels liberating. I notice just how much I’d put on my shoulders back at home, and how loose I feel as it all slips off. There was no choice but to be eaten by the present.
I’ve got quite the expectations for The Moment and being present. In the west it feels like a lost art, championed through yoga YouTube channels, travel bloggers, and Alan Watts voice overs. I hear it comes with no stress and no anxiety, pure release.
Despite my occasional pilgrimages, I’m the present’s worst offender. I’ve chosen the hustle and bustle of NYC and ambitions that leave me naive and obsessed with tomorrow. There’s a constructed time for stillness that when wasted, turns to stress. I’m constantly grasping at time. The only authentic version of now left was nestled away in long conversations or a craving for the munchies. Reality is what we put our attention towards, and mine was everywhere. I always knew in today's hivemind world there was no way to hack it, entertainment too optimized and unplugging too unpragmatic. Even a minimalist can’t resist a movie night in.
What if human beings evolved into our hunky selves precisely because we don't live in the moment. We're the only animals we know of who are constantly forecasting the future, we’re not bound to simple feedback loops and in our head, we uncontrollably create versions of the next moment. We dream and hope and picture every different version of ourselves. We prepare and analyze risk before stepping foot in the ring.
And when it all gets too much we look back. Swimming around in our most intense memories, the moments life felt full and we knew who we were. Stuck in the shackles of reflection, thinking how we could have done more or how we ever let someone feel that way. We're creatures of the past and future, who too easily miss that sliver of a second we sit in now.
Maybe it’s always been about subtraction. From the early shamans, to the existentialists, we knew desire had no place in the highest state of being. When Buddha got to Northern India he gave it new life for his 4th noble truth, copyright free, when he proclaimed that suffering came from craving. To want something at all, to love something and fear its disappearance, is to dwell in that gap between past and future. Kierkegaard declared that too much possibility led to madhouse and “the sickness of infinitude”
To finally find this moment everyones talking about, apparently all you gotta do is peel back the layers to get to your self. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Mattieson reflects, “the secret place we have always been is overgrown by the thorns and thickets of ideas, fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions.” Stepping out from the fog and static of my own choices, there my present self would be, waiting patiently around the fire. Zen Buddhists call it “our true nature”. Toaist, fulfillment. All I needed was more of less of me.
Thankfully having just hauled a 40 pound gas canister up what used to be a glacier, throwing up along the way, there literally wasn’t much of me left anyways. And looking across the canyon, there wasn’t much of the glacier either. Just an apocalyptic graveyard of boulders, as if the bones were infected and left to rot. So let's check inventory again. Subtracted was all choice, distraction, sense of self and glacier ice. I should have known this would be lovely. Not jubilance or ascendance, just pleasantly sitting on rocks.
I work through some favorite memories, thought about how I’d give my loved ones more love and appreciated an absence of craving. I then realized I had no watch and therefore, had no clue how long it’d been. Or for that matter, how long it’d take them. I can’t go up or down and once the panic passed—wondering what would happen if everyone else also got acute mountain sickness and also are looking at the clouds—I sink back into my surprisingly comfy moment. With no notebook, all interesting thoughts and witty lines are lost. Everything is for its own sake, my greatest nightmare.
But you really aren’t short of inspiration as your brain glides from thought to thought. Being in the heart of the Himalayas, the spiritual birth place to so many religions, I assumed if I looked long enough there'd be some emergent property or I’d experience some deeper sense of self. But there wasn’t.
When people talk of the present their words can betray them. Whatever the holy experience, the reader has no choice but to reinterpret it into their own experience of the world. Delicate, the moment is inevitably killed with inadequate descriptions. In film, we remember the beginning, high point and the end, but that imposes a time that doesn’t exist here. I’m forced to live in a never ending single point on a line.
What if boredom was an activity, a canvas? Much of meditation is realizing how much is going on around you. Does reflection count as being present? What about focus? Fear? Surely awareness? How about uncertainty, or as Arendts calls it “non-time”, where if we could live in any moment but right now then we’d know what would happen, flattened by certainty. “The past would crush you with tradition and the future with determinism”. In Saving Time, Jenny Odell explores the moment as love, where nothing attaches you more to our reality. She also explains how the present comes like rain, overwhelmed by it leaving as quickly as it came.
But all those are just thoughts left to be overgrown by the valley. All that’s here is me, utterly butchering the moments enlightenment by trying to crack and outwit it. Unable to dethrone Eat Pray Love.
Can I even measure now-ness without change? After all, nature at its very core is how things grow. So maybe it’s a time thing then? But is time something that can even be accounted for or is it completely nonsensical, felt differently in different moments?
At first time is thrown on us linearly as we explode through early life, milestones and new days. Then we begin to learn how to chop it up, fit it neatly into cubes and schedules. Eventually it starts getting defined for us, in return defining us. We offer it in return for wages, security and jetskis, our only true currency to give to this spinning world. Even in leisure we begin to compartmentalize it, from the hours it takes to mastery, to the amount of episodes we can get in one sitting. We begin to decide how much of it we need to live fully or to stay sane. The one thing we always seem to not leave enough of or are able to give more.
As the old adage goes, you never step in the same river twice. But the moments I’m living in feel much less poetic. It never felt like I had the luxury of such a tranquil vantage point. To me I’ve always felt I experienced time like we’re on a donut shaped floaty smack in the middle of the river. Once in a while we let our butts get wet, feeling the temperature at a random moment, trying to grasp the meaning of the changing river as it barrels by us. The only control we have is which way we spin, choosing to look forward or backwards, creating our reality from what holds our attention in that moment from that specific view.
