Aches and an Existential Crisis: Day Five

Courthouse Tower

Few people realize how lazy I am.  Nor do they suspect the effort involved in maintaining this state.  The world either conspires to keep me as busy as possible, or it is simply its default setting.  

We are creatures living in a world which places soul grinding demands upon us.  We realize, far too late, that most of the sacrifices we leverage against our precious time was not worth the effort.  People who develop a chronic illness know this all too well. If one is sick, suddenly the mistakes and misconceptions of one's healthy years appear as a sin.  

Many people may be upset with this statement. But the metaphysical underpinning that few, or no efforts are worth the price we pay, is no one’s particular fault.  It rests with God, or the Divine, or the Stars, or the Great Accident of the Unfolding of the Universe.  

Pine Tree Arch

That hardly makes me a depressive. I think that God is testing us.  He/She/Its purpose (and I don’t like assigning God a purpose, but we will do it here as a though exercise) is to force us to either say yes or no to the heavy demands this world imposes on us.  Most of us say yes, and God, I believe, feels sad for us.  "He said yes again," God says, and shakes his/her/its allegorical head.  "Why does he always do that?"  God asks no one in particular.  "It is literally killing him."

As I am standing on a rock at the entrance to Arches National Park, gazing at the snow-capped peaks of the La Sal Mountains near the Colorado border, this sensation practically bowls me over.  The mountains are only an hour and a half away, but they seem more distant – perhaps  on another planet.  Again, the dome has been lifted off the world, and the Space that is the setting of our

The distant La Sal Mountains

planet, the very stage we stand upon, opens like an abyss.  I feel this, but it is gone far too quickly.  How long did I need to stand at the overlook, overlooking those mountains? Overlooking our lives. When would the sensation have drained in the gutter of flesh and blood?  Would I be there still if not for more “pressing” matters?

Then I realize something more subtle about my predicament.   If I die at 85, than I live for another 37 years.  How many of those years will be healthy, if we define this as “ as a man in overall control of his mind and his body?”  Would I then have 27 years?  30 years?  Less?  Our predicament is that we know nothing of all about the most important issue that faces us – how long will we live, and what shape we our elder years will form. 

Seeing the La Salle Mountains from the rocky overlook, I get a glimpse of what is, for me, a cloud burst from eternity.  In this place, the land reflects back monumental distances, colossal formations of rock, jagged and deep canyons of staggering proportions.  This is a world evolving through space and time, just as we are; we share a similar fate.  The stones and sand of Arches outlive us all – as people, as a species – yet none of this matters on the existential level.  In the gut, the land lives forever.  We die soon.

We drive on, and the sense of space becomes, richer, more defined.  Hanging Rock is up ahead: a boulder (an insufficient word) balanced on top of the pillar of stone.  It is not hanging, but perched.  It looks like it may fall at any moment, and maybe it will.  Beyond it, a plain of rolling sand unfolds to the horizon.  There is the impression, which is hard to ignore or transfer into some other image, that the massive stones were placed by an intelligent being without a sense of symmetry. 

Landscape Arch

These formations are impressive, but people come to Arches not for this type of monumental stone, but for the Arches.  Formed by“fins” of rock, the arches formed when that sea dropped, the land rose, and then collapsed back.  There are over 2000 arches in the park, and none of them will remain forever.  Some of the weaker ones, with cracks on the upper arch and thin areas on the sides, could fall in the next major storm, or last thousands of years.  But fall they will.

We see most of the major arches.  Some we miss.  We approach Devil’s Garden, peek around the corner, and decide the terrain is too sandy for our energy level.  We loop back.  Double Arch is popular.  The parking circle is completely full, so people park anywhere along the road.  The arch is so large, that beneath it feels like a spacious cavern.  People bite more than they can chew.  I help a man down a slope, and then pull his smallest child next.  A little girl asks for help on yet another slope.  “To go up or down?” I ask her.  “Down.”  So I hold out my hands and she grasps them, and I swing her to level ground.  There are too many people.

In yet another part of the park is a group of petroglyphs.  These are from sometime between 1530 to 1830, as the figures ride horses.  

Native Rock Drawings

On the overlook trail to  Delicate Arch the land is sufficed with granular copper. The salty green sand gives the appearance of the under-story of a forest in first bloom.  This perplexes the senses.  I feel overwhelmed.

But I am rescued,  We must leave.  We have yet another destination.  Once more, I am struck with how powerfully inert my life is; here, all this time, while I was doing my little tasks, this landscape existed.  We are both mutable, this landscape and I, but I am tenuously so; yet I realize, when leaving, that I must shake this awful feeling.  This election of myself as special, as worthy of an elegy to finite life, is not something worthy to lament.  We all share this fate.  I am not special.  I do not want election.  

People approaching Double Arch

Double Arch