As part of the ongoing effort to make life more exciting here, a group of us decided to make a weekend trip down to the tiny town of Pichilemu to watch the South American Surf Championships and see a little more of Chile. I’m not normally interested in surfing much, but it was a lot more fun than expected. The best waves in South America happen off the tip of a very rocky cliff, and the modest crowd camped out by the edge on a turf of blankets and tarp. Quality reggae was played throughout (another thing I’m not normally interested in but turned out great) and the surfers took the time to meet people and take a pics. Best of all, not only were free pancakes and fruit accompanied by free coffee, but it was real ground coffee made with a full espresso machine! In Chile of all places! It was too much for me to handle after suffering nescafe for five months. After my third double espresso with cinnamon in two hours, I was getting worried about twitching myself off the cliff edge and called it quits.
One of the things that struck me yet again was the sheer quantity of energy in every wave. These things were 7 or 8 meters high, at least as thick, and many miles wide. Think of how heavy a bucket of water is, then imagine a million of them moving as fast as you can run. That happens every ten seconds, continuously. Recreating that with machines would require incredible amounts of energy. In a given 1-kilometer stretch of coast at Pichilemu, approximating an average wave of 5 by 5 meters moving at 4 meters per second (8 mph) and a wave every ten seconds, the power output figures to 20 megawatts on velocity alone – enough to run 4 freight trains at peak output!
The next weekend was a day trip to La Campana National Park, featuring a very difficult hike up 2000 meters to the rocky summit of a mountain by the same name. Here are the picture highlights:
Additionally, Aunt Pat sent me this comment on my posts about time to start a discussion. Please join in!
‘I've been pretty interested in what you have written about time, as it's something I also like to think about. There are some radically different ways of thinking about time, which can completely change one's way of going about living. For instance, the early pagan cultures--Sumerian, Roman, Greek--all saw time as being cyclical. Whatever is happening has happened again and will happen again. Nothing is new, so why build anything? Those cultures also did not have the concept of the individual, rather one was always part of the clan/tribe/people/etc. So there was no such thing as individual history, and no such thing as linear time to go along with that.
Along came Abraham and all that changes. (I just finished a really interesting book called "The Gifts of the Jews" about this.) Abraham gets called by a God who is not just another family member, rather glorified (literally), but a God who created all and is above all. God called Abraham out of Sumer, and you have the first individual history starting to be written. The first writings that are about "I". The future is now really dependent on what I do in the present. History becomes the movement of time. Each moment is unique and unrepeatable. And so hope is born--hope of doing something worthwhile with my life, of making a difference.
Then there are the Asian folk, at least I'm told the Japanese, who do not "spend" time, but rather "collect" it. So when you get to the end of a long life, you have a treasury collected, not an emptiness spent--with the question was it all worth it?
Then there are interesting ideas about time when God gets included. For instance, as creator He stands above time, and sees all time at the same time all the way to the end of time (which study is called teleology, the study of the end of time). So He already knows everything I'm writing and your response. That calls forth a very different relationship!
In church we have something called 'liturgical time' (in the Orthodox Church, I don't think other Christians have developed this in the same way). So when we go to church, like I do at least twice a day every day, we consider that we are encountering eternity--the membrane between time and eternity is very thin, so we can actually experience the Kingdom of Heaven now. We can experience the reality of God now, even if in very small part. Which helps interrupt the constant demand of time--the urgency and resulting anxiety that you wrote about. It enables us to begin (it's a life-long process) to live more fully in the present, which is really touching eternity. Each moment becomes a gift both from God and that can be used for Him and given back to Him. One of our most well loved theologians said, "Become at every moment a fresh paradise to those around you." That's a goal worth living for!’ –
Well, let me start off by mentioning that this is now my fifth draft. I can’t make up my mind.
Philosophy is something I dodged for a long time, mostly because I found it depressing. I always ended up coming back to a kind of cynical, fatalist view of the world, as in ‘in the grand scheme of things, nothing matters’. If I could sit on Pluto and speed up time and just watch the Earth turn for a few billion years, it would certainly seem that way. Whether you were the one to build a fantastic empire, or the one to bomb it to the ground, well, who cares? I’m on Pluto, and it’s now a billion years later. In the long run, you and all your actions really didn’t matter, however spectacular they may have been. Pass me the popcorn and we’ll watch the sun die out and consume the inner solar system.
Depressing, and that philosophy would lead us all to hedonism and suicide. It doesn’t pass the gut test. It also doesn’t answer the question of limits – if I can sit on Pluto and speed up time at my leisure, can I experience the end of time? Is there an end of time? Does it even matter?
Whether or not there is a beginning and end to the universe doesn’t change the fact that there’s a beginning and end to life. You mentioned a number of different culture’s views on time – I’ll add one more: animals. The vast majority of animals (humans, elephants, dolphins, and perhaps a few other very intelligent animals being exceptions) have no internal concept of their own death. Many have little perception of the future as well. Their actions are all reactions; based on external conditions, habits, instinct, feelings. There’s a branch of philosophy/psychology that says that majority of human actions and feelings are, under the surface, tied to our consciousness of our own impending death.
So where does this all lead? If living immediately in the present is the ultimate goal, are animals smarter and happier than we are?
I have more questions than answers.
No comments:
Post a Comment