A Separation
Running along the lakeside, the beauty of the scenery struck me at every moment, even in the throes of exhaustion. The water burned orange with late afternoon sun, while a gentle breeze wafting off the lake brought relief from the summer heat. The vivid green foliage, now flamed-tipped against the sky, swayed undiminished in the failing daylight hours. Even the neatness of the well-maintained gravel path I bounded over pleased me. The manufactured nature of the site—a reservoir with a path built around it—never detracted from the joy I found here, nor evidently from that of the other visitors I passed, who acknowledged me warmly and seemed just as content with their environs.
The total effect of all this I can best describe as a sense of holiness, but without the blandness or obedience that the word might imply. Just as the vaulted ceilings and baroque ornamentation of the great cathedrals induce that mysterium tremendum that we call religious feeling, the towering trees and earthy-fresh quality of the air felt anything but mundane.
In such a mood, self-consciousness recedes and I feel everything deeply. The wind seems to blow right through me, rising to meet me when I need it. Unheard music emanates from the leafy canopies, which I swear I could have heard if I stopped and listened. The scene takes on a storybook quality, my route a wordless narrative through a fabled land, ending with that final ascent towards the small parking lot and my car. The spell lasted through much of the drive home, until I reached my apartment complex and returned to normalcy.
Yet in the middle of all this, I began to have this nagging thought: What do I do with all this? Why is this all so fleeting and how can I capture, assimilate, and use whatever it is that I get from these leaves, from this profound breeze that seems to satiate something primordial in me? I wondered how I could somehow package this, make it into something tangible. These sensations seemed too intense, too valuable, to simply let them pass once I left this place. This experience would become something I would tell people about, a piece of the narrative I tell about myself and how I occupy myself in my free time. (Here I am writing about it.)
I became aware of a sense of separation between these experiences and "I," the experiencer, feeling briefly the coldness and distance of that disconnection. The world seemed smaller and more remote. I wondered why I came to this place and what I would do once I left it. My motivations became strange to me, although I never slowed my pace.
“[Separation] constitutes the state of everything that exists; it is a universal fact; it is the fate of every life. And it is our human fate in a very special sense. For we as men know that we are separated... We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong.”
But such thoughts, however persistent, rarely go unassailed by the fogginess of mind borne out of the tired body. Exhaustion (and the will to push through it) tends to force thoughts into the background of consciousness. This elemental existence—paradoxically, perhaps, given our status as "the thinking animal"—feels closer to the heart of reality. In these moments, the self is experienced, at last, not as a form of separation but as an arbitrary barrier between identical substances. You're no longer estranged from yourself and from others, and the self, now made porous, allows things to come and go towards a stable equilibrium.
After these reflections, I think I have an answer to that yearning question that so troubled me. Rather than needing to hold on to these experiences, to forge something practical and lasting from them, I can let them go and experience the freedom of that letting go. Learning to do nothing more than enjoy them in the moment is what I take away from them. It's tapping into a system of reward wholly distinct from the one we've been taught, where the reward is merely a brief respite from pain. The experience is the reward.
