What travels

You are here. Your senses tell you so with certainty. You can touch the surfaces and taste that scrambled egg you just cooked. You sit in the hot-tub wondering if a big black bear is going to climb over the fence. You hear the fountain trickle. You are here. But not in a permanent, historic sense. No time continuum has brought you here, a job or family in Tahoe, a cabin for sale. No, you are here, but only in the moment. Now. You are here NOW. But if now is all that ever exists, then, if you really, really, relaxed into this immense feeling of belonging, you would perhaps find the KEY that shifts you into a different continuum, the one with the past and the future you always wanted. In this expanded windy morning, out in the desert, in a later now, you try to imagine what kind of act of rebellion or enlightenment would have brought you to live here, in that other life, of which you are only living, intensely, the now. Later still, you look in the mirror, the same mirror you looked into last year, and the year before. You have more wrinkles, you are skinnier, fatter, fitter, less fit than before. You discover that now, as you are not protected by your continuum. You are naked. You also find that you are not as flexible, nice and funny as you thought you were. Divided as you are between fear and bliss.
As you travel, you morph into a new person, you shed some resentment and grow jewellery, new t-shirts and hats, sunglasses and a tan. All of these things, you think, will keep me here. Time is slow at first, and during the walks on the beach with your travelling companion, the now and the future of here seem so permanent, so exciting, so infinite. And your past, really, doesn't feel that real. It's a remote blue planet seen from space, round and simple, easy to conquer. Your life seems easy to conquer. As the journey progresses and time suddenly accelerates into shorter and shorter nows, the walks and talks on the beach change intensity, not so much about future adventures, but on ways to bring back all of this, to pack this light, this sun, the funny dogs that lick your knees, the chollas, the desert, the swimming pools, how to pack all of this in your 23kg suitcase. And, in the safety of distance, you approach conversations based on change, on solving, on climbing mountains, conquering the universe. But the very last night, while emptying bins full of your discarded bottles, hiding in the shelves the books you thought you might want to read and now are not so sure. While you pack all your knick-knacks, bits of stones and driftwood, the pain of separation becomes overwhelming, the light seems to dim, and you find yourself walking with your partner on a dark beach, staring at the stars, and feeling that you are now torn even from him. Because you've failed. You failed to find the KEY.
Silence on the plane. You try to sleep but your eyes are full of images going faster and faster. And then. Then you are here. For real. Although, it doesn't seem real at all. The key fits the lock. You slip back into your continuum. But it doesn't feel right, at all. You sit on what you rationally know is your couch, and think, I can't cope. I WILL NEVER COPE AGAIN. You open the suitcase, pull out all your knick-knacks and new t-shirts and put them on the floor. They are all dead. You take your socks off, and there is sand between your feet. You look at your partner, shyly, "We are still there, aren't we?". We are still there, where we belong. In a life without continuum and just an expanded intense magical now. You realise that all the stuff you put in your suitcase, the sun, the rented car, the museum tickets, has lost its fizz, like imported champagne. You are here, again, naked.
Too much sleep or not enough sleep, images flitting, tan fading, bills paying, going for local walks, slowly, some of your cachinas end up on the TV shelf, some new recipes sneak into your cooking routine, and a sense of achievement, peace and expansion slowly takes over. We were there, you say. We were there, together.

Points of view

By chance, I came across an article my father wrote in 2002 about the view from our Genoa flat. The view was indeed amazing, over the greenhouse with its palm trees, the whole city and, on a clear day, the sea. To the left there was a castle. Throughout my youth, I used to look from the window, at the grey slate roofs and the castle, which, against the setting sun, sometimes looked like a skull. I loved that flat, and it will always be in my heart. So, holding back the tears, I read my dad's article, curious and scared to learn how he felt about the place. It turned out - and actually I should have remembered - that, while I, in my room, was looking ahead, at the buildings, the castle, and the sea, my father, in his study, was looking through his bay window at the winding road. And while he was looking and thinking of all the years gone by, of his ghosts from the war, he was also waiting for me to come home. This image, this different point of view, the looking ahead and the looking to the side, made me suddenly see a different person, not my father, the all-knowing, the powerful, the wise, the giant, but a man, a mortal, with all his insecurities, fears, and sorrows. As I don't have children, I never really think of what it must be like to be a parent, of how mysterious a young life must appear. Mysterious and worrisome, fragile, yet in need of space and trust in order to grow. Being a rebellious, exploratory and dreamy child, I must have appeared particularly mysterious to him, while he pondered on how to be a good father, looking at the winding road from the bay window. Sometimes, out of desperation, he would make me sit on the couch and read to me from the Ecclesiastes, 'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:, A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted...' He was hoping to slow me down, to make me wait until I was more prepared. But the time was right, it was the right time for me. Now, I like to think of this sense of time as an intuitive clock, that has its natural speed, its right time for things. Even though my fast clock was cause of concern for my father, back then, I followed its rhythm, like a dog on a walk, sometimes running, sometimes stopping to investigate a scent or a movement. It was only later in life that I started fighting against my clock, wanting to learn things faster, to work harder, more and more, in order to get to that place that is supposed to be my destination. But my intuitive clock thinks otherwise, 'To everything there is a season... a time to get and a time to lose.' The journey will take the time it needs to take, for how valiantly I fight against windmills. I am glad I didn't know that my father was not omniscient when I was a child and needed to think it was possible to have control over our own lives. And I am glad that my intuitive clock has shown me a different version of my father today, today that I am the same age he was then, when he sat on his chair and read me from the Ecclesiastes. There is indeed a time for everything.

The extraordinary value of ordinary days

Tonight, when your loved one(s) will ask you, 'What  did you do today?', you will probably answer, 'Nothing much,' or 'I bought a T-shirt.' But, by telling this very thin story, you are discarding the wonderful magic of ordinary things, you are not acknowledging that, at every given moment, you are thinking and feeling thousands of thoughts and emotions. So let's see if we can tell a better, and more realistic, story, when someone asks us what we have done today. As an example, I will tell you a summary of about an hour of my day. Here goes the story of a very ordinary day.
    On the way to the tube, I saw a blue Fiat 500 parked on the street. A modern one, it shouldn't even be called a 500. But I noticed a pair of eyeglasses on the dashboard. Heavy turtle rims. They could have belonged to the 60s and 70s, when there were real Fiat 500s that my friends drove in a very bumpy jaggedly fashion. Because they had to do that funny dance with clutch and accelerator, called double-declutching. La doppietta, in Italian. La doppietta is also a double-barrelled shotgun. The one Elmer used to hunt the great Bugs Bunny, the coolest guy in the world, who was totally unfazed by this guy trying to kill him. I bought my husband a book about Bugs, 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare, for his birthday, a while ago. Unfortunately it was a library copy, very grotty and with those sticky protective covers. Bugs is great and I have an original cell painting of him sitting in a cinema. Before digital, every frame of an animated film was painted by hand. By an artist called... a cell painter. The colour had to be laid completely flat and smooth. A friend of mine caught the tail end of this now deceased profession. She wasn't too impressed with the job, but I was.
    I had by now reached the station and boarded the train. I glanced at a young woman wearing bright red tights. Coloured tights have been fashionable before, I am sure, in the 70s. I am almost certain I bought a pair of red tights as a young girl and felt the special excitement of new unworn clothes. I also had ribbed woollen tights as a kid. Another memory now appeared, of me walking down the stairs of a hotel in the mountains. It was the last day of our school trip and we had to dress up for dinner. I had woollen tights and a woollen jersey dress. While I was walking down the stairs of the hotel, blushing from shyness and allergy to wool, the thought suddenly occurred to me that soon, very soon, this moment I was living would be a distant memory. I had a similar thought three years later, while I was waiting for a friend near some steps (time must be step related) to go and see Easy Rider. The friend never turned up. I waited for almost an hour, thinking, One day this will be a very distant memory. And so right I was. This second event would not happen today with mobile phones. Had I had one then, I would have not waited, and I would have missed an opportunity to understand the healing power of time. These two episodes are so engraved in my memory, I am sure they will still be there when all other memories will have faded.
   By this time I had reached the store I was going to, and, serendipitously, found a Bugs Bunny T-shirt. The guy at the cashier was in his late 20s, intellectual Buddy Holly type, with a French accent. He said, 'Ah, Bugs Bunny, he's from my generation, he was my hero as a kid.' 'Your generation?' I enquired amused, and told him about my cell painting, the lost art of film animation, and the healing power of time.
   So, what did I do today? Nothing much, I just bought a T-shirt.

Making Time

I have just finished reading Making Time by Steve Taylor (on My Shelfari) - Why time seems to pass at different speeds and how to control it. After a few pages in which I could relate to what he was describing - the internal chatter and other stuff about how time can expand in states of maximum concentration, but it shortens in states of absorption - he lost me completely. Not that I could not follow what he was saying, I just simply have a different experience on the matter. For me a day can be long while living it and short looking back. And it is not due to the amount of experiences and exposure to the new, but to change. Time feels longer for me when the before and after an experience are different, i.e. after I have changed in some respect. But then again I've never suffered at the thought of time passing too fast, for me it passes too slow. Taylor says that in states of mindfulness, i.e., living and experiencing and concentrating on the present, time seems longer or we might transcend it altogether. He says that children live in the now. But so do I, I am aware of the clouds and the trees and buildings, sounds, all of that, micro and macro worlds to discover. I'm surprised to hear that other people don't. It's sad. But in the now there always seems to be something bugging me, I might be thirsty or tired or cold or carrying a heavy bag. So the future is still a better place. If I need more time I think of reincarnation. What a shame that we don't seem to learn from one life to the next. What a shame that what we identify with the I (or ego in the sense of the I) is our personality, which is what we shall leave behind. Time has not passed fast for me, but I still don't know how I got here.