The Movement of TIme

Time?  Is it foe or friend?  I guess it depends on your perspective or, maybe it is even more transient.  Your relationship with time could be related to your emotional state.  Now that I'm in my mid-fifties, I find myself obsessed with time.  I guess facing one's mortality makes you think about it more often.  When you're young, you feel invincible however; the arrival of age quickly brings you back to earth.

Aging is a bizarre reality.  Your body begins to move slower, you enter into an interminable battle against your arch enemy - gaining weight, you wake up stiff, and you have to take more breaks on your mountain hikes.  Your mind remains young yet, it must come to terms with its new reality.  Some pretend to remain young with fast cars, young lovers, hip clothes, or a nouveau hair style.  In reality, they're doing nothing more than the proverbial ostrich sticking his head in the sand while hoping the lioness doesn't devour him.  I prefer to see the world anew.

You're always in a hurry when you're young.  You've got places to go and people to see.  It wasn't until I got older that I began to realize just how much I'd missed.  I'm an alpinist and in my youth, I was infatuated with how far or how high I could ascend.  I never stopped to notice the little things along my ascent.  With age, I've come to realize just how much I missed.  Tree bark patterns, the moist beauty of moss on wet granite, the sound of spring runoff, the halo like iridescence of above tree-line spindrift.

The months of September to January find me afield with my Boykin Spaniel.  We went chukar hunting yesterday along the canyon filled flanks of the Deschutes River upstream from Maupin, Oregon.  I began to think about time as we briskly walked from where I'd parked to the canyon's edge.  I decided to really watch my dog.  It was a truly uplifting hunt.  Rather than think about when we'd raise the next covey, I marveled at his work.  He worked the wind with his nose; his bob tail never ceased wagging back and forth; he quartered left to right and back again and, he regularly turned to check on my progress.  Time stood still for him.  He was existing within the parameters of the moment.  As we drove back home, it suddenly dawned on me what my lesson for the day was.

Mental focus stops time.  The key to happiness is an active mind totally involved in the task at hand.  Micro analyze minutia and you'll find the nuance of life.  Maybe on my next hike I should stop more often,take a seat on a luxuriant bed of pine needles and listen to the world.  Who knows, I might learn something.