05.27.09
Keeping Time…
Hiking in the mountains is a special kind of misery.
A day of treking might include elevation gains of thousands of feet. Hikers will find themselves scrambling over boulders, hopping from rock to rock or climbing for hours on an ankle-twisting trail. The weather can go from a roasting sun to a bone-chilling hail storm in a matter of minutes and then end with icey winds as you sit perched on atop a snowfield after crossing an exhausting pass. And this is all going up — down is harder yet.
In fact if you divide a week-long mountain trek into days or even hours, you find yourself saying “that hour was awful” almost every hour. And at day’s end as your 70-pound pack is trying to fling you into an abyss at every opportunity — you may start questioning your rationale for the journey. “Let’s see, I was climbing the first two hours — that was hard, the third hour I got rained on (with hail) and then the last two hours the sun came out and baked me as I climbed another thousand feet”. If you look at it hour by hour — the day was awful, but if you look at it as a whole — it was a spectacular experience, a day that will always be remembered.
There seems to be a paradox here. A day broken into it’s constituents is awful, but when you stand back and look at the whole trip – -it’s fantastic. It’s sort of like crossing into a dimension where time doesn’t mean anything. All of those miserable hours add up to a wonderful whole.
In physics, there’s something called the observer principle which posits that an observer inevitable effects the outcome of an experiement — especially when it is measured. For instance, if you are measuring electrons with light (photons) you change the behavior of the electron. If you are measuring heat with a thermometer, the mercury in the thermometor absorbs some of the heat energy being measured lowering the temperature.
Nowhere is this more true then how we measure our life and experiences. Looking at it in hours and days is almost always a let down. Thomas Edison spend years testing 3000 different theories of how a light bulb might work and eventually he tested 6,000 different candidates for filament material. Measuring his life by the hours he spent on that endeavor would be truly depressing — sort of like measuring your mountain trip based on how many steps you took.
But there are other answers!
At Innsbrook’s Memorial Day Party this year, a couple who has spent many years at Innsbrook asked me to take their picture. I obliged and afterward the gentleman told me that the photograph was to celebrate their first Memorial Day together since his wife’s life-saving surgery.
All the steps that lead to that moment were uncounted for them, the days and weeks of worry were left unmeasured. But another Memorial Day together at Innsbrook was to be counted and celebrated.
Later that weekend I bought a canoe at Innsbrook’s boat auction that I intend to measure this summer with. I know of a family at Innsbrook who had a tradition of after dinner cruises in which they would read “My Side of the Mountain” together on the lake as the sun set.
Their kids are grown now, and those cruises are part of the way they remember their experiences at Innsbrook. And As I watch my three boys sprout up, I certainly don’t want my time with them measured in years and months. I would prefer our yard stick to be the number of evenings we spent together on a still lake sharing a great book.
When we talk about “keeping time,” too often we mean how we keep track of it. Perhaps a better way to think is how we keep it in our hearts.