Reflections on Time and Space

Last week I watched the sun set over Los Angeles' Pacific coastline. A few days before that I was in NYC, a few days later in San Francisco, and last weekend I spent in Washington DC. I feel like I’ve been on a tour of the United States. It’s a bit overwhelming having spent the last year outside of the country, but it’s also nice to be reminded of the diversity and greatness of this most unusual land. At moments I find myself lost in all the sounds, colors, people, cars. I shut my eyes and remember that another reality exists, that thousands of miles away, the wind is blowing into my apartment in Medellin, vallenato is floating out of restaurants and cafes, and that the Andes timelessly enclose the city like protective walls around a fortress.

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The reason - or at least the official one - I went out to California in the first place was to give a required hour-long Rotary talk to my sponsoring Rancho Cucamonga club. As I drove back to LA from Orange County on the 1-10 I was flooded with memories of college and 4 years of southern California life: all-nighters at the library, wrestling over controversial ideas with friends, my old lacrosse team, college roommates, trips to LA, ex- boyfriends.... it all came back so fast with each bend in the road and every glimpse of Mt. Baldy’s glorious peaks. I even visited Pitzer, my alma mater, and wandered anonymously through the grassy mounds and in and out of old classrooms. As I made my way back through the Inland Empire I couldn’t help reflect on life - in all its glory and confusion. My life in Northampton, Massachusetts; in Claremont, California; in Medellin, Colombia; in Maun, Botswana. What is reality? We tend to think of life in a linear way, like moments and days and years that each succeed the last. But then memories confuse everything. All of a sudden we are reminded of someone, something, some moment and it’s no longer in the past but right here, right now. I love Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five interpretation of time: moments don’t exist continuously like beads on a string, but rather all moments -past, present and future- always have existed and always will exist. Ultimately we’re all individual souls with unique realities but overlapping experiences and moments on this earth... and the overlap can take form in physical space, in romance, in intellectual thoughts, in age. It’s incredible to think that all the people I love in this world are scattered in a million directions, yet breathing the same air and drinking the same water under one sky.


I’ll go back to Colombia in July and finish my certificate program in Geo-politics. Then I have to decide.... stay and keep working there? Go somewhere else? Come back to the States? These questions feel daunting to me right now, especially on this visit home as I float in and out of so many places and realities. But what keeps me grounded is faith in the flow of things. And connections with people. I trust my own capabilities and am blessed to have a powerful community of family and friends who have illuminated my life with wonderful, beautiful, inspiring energy. Life is dynamic, so full of new experiences, new connections, suffering, pain, beauty, clutter, doubt, love...but ultimately it is this myriad of emotions that we are capable of experiencing - and do experience - that makes us human! What a gift to feel so full of life, even amidst the chaos.

Walking with my wonderful mom and aunt this morning, we contemplated life in its many dimensions, and reflected on a William Blake poem that has really stuck with me all day:

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise”