In this world that we have devised, detaching oneself from the concept of time is practically impractical. With watches on our wrists, alarms on our phones, colossal constructions created simply to display monstrous clocks, deadlines, punching in, punching out, beeping, chiming and ringing and dinging every minute, every moment, escaping time is seemingly unrealistic.
However, there are ways. There is a path one can take to forget -- even for a slice of an instance -- that we have constructed our universe to revolve around the number 24.
I am fortunate enough to spend the next several months of my life just one block from the Atlantic Ocean and one mile from Acadia National Park. Surrounded by the birds, the bees and all the creatures of the sea, this is where wilderness lies. Tourists and buses and restaurants plague the park each day and it is often a challenge to find the wilderness here -- but it exists. I have seen it --and I want to share this discovery with you.
One day, without a schedule and without Siri, some friends and I made our way throughout the winding one-ways and scattered cars of Acadia. Soon though, our way became the one less traveled. Our way was not hindered by time.
After thousands of steps and sights, one of our friends asked if we would like to stack some rocks. Confused, yet hedged with the tendrils of curiosity we said yes. He had been there the year before and remembered which turns to take, where to leave our car behind, and why we needed to go. He left us with little explanation of what exactly we would be doing, where we would be doing it and why we we should trust him that this adventure was worth our time. After several minutes of trekking along the cliffs that cloaked the ocean's breaks, he found what we were looking for. Carved into the face of the cliff was a modest beach coated in layers of spherical rocks: giant, circular, oval, elliptical, oblique shaped rocks. We carefully climbed down the fifty-foot cliffs and hopped from boulder to boulder, feeling the rubber of our shoes bend atop their rounded summits as the ocean breeze swelled within our noses and chilled our skin.
Our friend who had been here before picked up an egg-shaped rock and tapped one of its edges on top of another rounded rock. With his pupils piercing the place where these two rocks joined each other, the rock ebbed and flowed and spun and released and caught and he waited until it found balance. Until both rocks merged to form one. Like a chemical reaction the two bonded to create one whole -- and all doubt, all judgement, every "can't" disintegrated in a flash of unforeseen reality.
Struck by this strange stasis of improbability I began to search for two parts of a whole: one rock to append another. Quickly, I learned that searching for a part of a whole is futile. I hopped from boulder to boulder, waiting for that part to call upon me -- to hail me toward it. And soon, they spoke and I forged bonds between the bones of the ocean -- I put pieces that should not, could not connect together, together.
I positioned one and then another and then another, from boulder to pebble they pieced together like droplets of flawless flakes of earth. Each circular hunk depended on the weight and pressure and the shape of the one below and above it to maintain the trunk of the tower. We created dozens of wild skyscrapers and along the way, we forgot about time.
The wilderness had cast its spell upon us -- we were wholly drenched in a trance. We did not spend or waste our time at this place, we collected it. We assembled the scraps the ocean had tossed and forgotten on the shoulders of its shores and we forgot about everything. Consumed by silence and patience and conviction we poised time on the tips of our fingers and dismantled the rules, the regulations, the guidelines, the codes, the modes, the formulas and the models that mold the archetypes that constrain the mind, the body and the soul.
This place exists within each of us. I dare you to find this place. It is not just this tucked away sliver of national park: it is everywhere. But do not search, let it find you. Let it call to you. Go into the wilderness. Listen to its sonnets. Do not wait for the minutes to make your memories. Go and collect your time.
