I'm back.
I sit at the foot of my bed and sigh. I've been wearing the same hiking pants over the last month. My mind naturally wonders about how much of my sweat they absorbed over the 200 miles trekk... I gladly push the grimey thoughts out of my head. Instead I focus on the present. My ass is pressed against a soft mattress. Something I haven't felt in some time. I focus my senses.
Then it all comes back.
The fear from when I was dropped off of a local bus in Dumre. The sting from a bloody blister. The mountainous rampart playing strip tease with the fog after a rainstorm. A familiar face of another trekker after a period of solitude. The sunrise over Annapurna-2.
After everything that happened, am I still the same person? How much do you need to change to become "new"? I remember taking a course my freshman year, Philosophy 3 - nature of the mind, that extensively covered this topic. Damn, I should've paid more attention back then - it's a phrase I say more frequently now than ever.
I spent a great deal of time on the trekk pondering over different topics. I try to summarize some of my learnings here.
Problems/Fears (and onions)
At the start of the journey (specifically after I was dropped off at Terminal G in SFO), I felt my knee buckle under the weight of the formidable unknown. I envisioned a physical black hole resting on my shoulder, sucking away at my spirit. I was scared for obvious reasons. I didn't speak the language. I don't know how I will navigate. I've never even backpacked in the States for more than a day, yet I have to trek for 3 weeks abroad. I don't know how I was going to react to the altitude. My doctor told me you'll feel the altitude at over 10,000 ft. I gulp at the fact that I have a 17,700 ft titan to conquer. Did I bring enough antibiotics? What about Diamox (for the altitude)? Chlorine dioxide water treatment? Is my pack too heavy? Will my startup's website stay up? Are there bears? What about the Yeti?
Soon my brain is paralyzed. The neurons are fired up like they're trying to achieve nuclear fusion, and there's no bandwidth left for me to form a rational thought. I sit in silence, exhaling harder with each breath.
Just then a lady announces the airport security protocol over the loudspeaker. Something about reporting unattended baggages.
That's right. I'm currently just sitting at the terminal. None of my fears/problems are happening now. I realize that though most of my fears are valid (I admit that a few are blatantly irrational), majority of them will not occur to me at a single moment. After all I can only experience life in a single slice of time. This means that at any given moment, there may be problem(s) for me to tackle, but they'll always be a subset of the collection of total problems (and probabilistically a small subset). Yet I always focus and feel pressured by the collective unknown; the black hole. But is it a black hole? I know what problems it might consist of. I have an idea on when the problems might occur, and how much they'll trouble me. So in reality, it's more like a discrete timeline of layers of problems. Suddenly the blackhole is looking like an onion.
Let's put it this way. It's unlikely that I'll have to swallow a giant raw onion. But rather, I'll peel each layer (and cry in the process, get it?), and tackle the individual problems. Now I can't instantaneously defeat the collective problems, i.e. the whole onion, but I don't have to; we can only experience moments in slices, since our sensory input is bound by the flow of time, which is linear. This means we can't live in multiple moments at once. So look up from your screen, and describe to yourself what you see. This is the current moment you're experiencing (and a discrete moment can last just a few millisecond to a whole millennium). And this current moment and each subsequent moment will contain a set of problems; but you'll always only have to deal with a single moment's worth of problems.
Equipped with this powerful thought, I start thinking about my immediate problems. Well frankly they've started boarding the plane. It would be problematic if I missed it. My immediate focus is to get my ass to the counter, hand over my ticket to be scanned, and board the plane. It's done, and it only took me 8 minutes. The next moment I'm seated in the plane. I start wondering how I'll get a taxi in a foreign country late at night (since my hotel transportation never responded). What about the $1,500 USD cash that the lack of reliable ATM in Nepal is forcing me to bring? If I get lost, will the map on my phone work? I won't have a valid sim card; where will I get a sim card? Then I stop my train of thoughts; I'm crossing the moment boundary. The only thing I should (and need to) focus on is how I'm going to spend the next 16 hours with my in-flight entertainment headphone jack malfunctioning. Sleep, I thought. And I did.
I'll talk about some of my other thoughts/discoveries in the next post.
