If modern life can be marked by anything it can be marked by constant motion. Everywhere you look is defined by the constant go go go, the ceaseless march of time rushing on to some unknown end. After a while it can be so overwhelming it drains your resolve to face the world around you. At this point it's nice to find a brief respite in some moment of quite stillness away from it all to reflect and recharge.
I was fortunate enough to stumble into one of these moments recently. It was in the final day of the USF XC team's running camp up in Soda Springs by Lake Tahoe. The other guys and I had just finished making dinner for the rest of the team and were looking for some way to amuse ourselves before making the long walk back to our cabin. A couple of the guys (Jack and Hugh) and I decided to go out and take one last look at the lake nears where the girls were staying. For some reason it popped into Hugh's head to go out on the lake and he hopped in a canoe to go out for one last trip around the lake. Then, only in that way that the minds of young men comes up with mischief when they are in a group, Jack and I had the thought to steal all the paddles and leave Hugh stranded on a lake without a paddle. After a bit of horsing around on the shore Hugh got a paddle and took off and Jack decided to follow him in a broken down old sailboat. A bit after he left I decided to follow them in a kayak by imitating the pro kayakers you see on the videos sliding down banks and over waterfalls by sliding off the shore into the water. I of course forgot that I'm just a college student and not a pro kayaker and I was wearing regular clothes instead of water proof ones and I got better acquainted with the lake than I would of liked for my troubles.
Going out on to the lake I began to realize that I had entered some new state of being as the lake was smooth as glass and the sky was bathed in the soft violet of the setting sun as bats and birds swooped above the waters surface. I found my wayward teammates out in the middle of the lake just floating and relaxing and I came to rest along side them. We stayed like that a good while the three of us floating together all in a row until we were joined by three more of our teammates in another canoe who pulled up and merged with our formation. Eventually a seventh would join us on a paddleboard of all things. There we were a bunch of young men sitting there quietly on a lake at the end of summer before school started, it looked like something out of one of those coming of age melodramas you see at awards season. Eventually the oncoming night forced us to head for home but our night wasn't quite over yet. No it wouldn't be over until we got back to our cabin after a slow walk through the dark under the stars gazing at the vast universe above us.
Looking back now I'm struck now by just how peaceful everything was, it was all so calm basking in the setting sun with only the occasional bat flying by to remind you that there was still a world in motion around you. It was the kind of moment that you frankly don't believe could be real and yet is. It's Interruptions in the flow of life such as this remind you to not get so caught up in the rat race of the world and to take a few moments to just be, they remind you to live.
