Getting Away

Like most people, I don’t always appreciate the value of a real getaway vacation: the type where you take a week or two away from home, away from work, and away from the usual day-to-day issues, responsibilities, places and people.

Taking some days off to just rest at home is good, of course, but it doesn’t really help when you need to think through issues and situations in your life and perhaps make some decisions. When you try to do that at home, the issues are still too close, and it is difficult to properly sort them out, put them in the proper perspective, and chart the right course.

I have been guilty of that far too often over the past years during the annual Ukrainian New Year and May holidays. I will relish the opportunity to take some days off from work, and I tell myself that I will take time, not only to rest, but to really do the kind of serious contemplation that I can never find time to do when I am working every day.

I say that I will organize my class materials, create some new ones, look over the situation with each student and group and determine what should be changed or improved. And I promise myself to spend time in quiet thought, really analyzing my life and making some hard decisions about the near and long-term future.

Sounds great. But invariably I allow myself to sleep a lot at the beginning, and when I am not sleeping, I continue the usual home Internet routine of watching innumerable news clips, movies and other stuff of very questionable usefulness. The beginning continues through the middle of the vacation and all the way to the end. And as the inevitable return to work looms, I find I have accomplished almost nothing that I had intended.

But aside from these weaknesses of will and discipline, taking vacations at home exposes another problem: the usual life and work remain too close at hand to effectively think and plan. There are forces at work in your daily life that influence you in certain directions, no matter if these are the right directions for you or not.

But sometimes, “getting away” doesn’t really help the situation; it only puts you into a different set of influences. When I was in the USSA last September, it gave me an opportunity to think about my life in Ukraine from a distance, which was good. But at the same time, there were some conflicting interests and opinions there that worked to influence me in another direction. It was still difficult to consider everything in a clear and neutral manner.

When you really need to get away, free your mind, and open yourself to let the universe show you the way, you need a neutral location and the chance to be alone in silence. I have just returned from a week in Switzerland, which is perhaps the most famous neutral country in history. And I did find some flashes of early-morning silence, as I mentioned in my previous post, Silence.

But overall, I did not really take advantage of it. It was a short trip, and my attention was happily paid to four beautiful little girls. The purpose of this trip was not contemplation, but rather to spend time with family. Still, I found time to think a bit, write several blog posts, and to think about the need to get away from the daily routine in order to sort things out.

I am not sure when my next vacation will be, let alone my next opportunity to relax in a truly neutral environment. Maybe it would be nice to spend some time by the sea on a warm beach or (my favorite) to take in the power and beauty a mountain forest.

Either way, I know what I need. The trick now is to make it happen.
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Silence

A few mornings ago I paused for a moment as I was getting dressed, and I noticed something that I have rarely experienced in the past seven years: complete silence.

I am staying at a kind of dormitory near my daughter’s house in Burtigny, Switzerland. At present, there is almost no one else staying here, so there are few internal noises. And Burtigny is a very quiet little village, so there is not much traffic through the center and few other sources of sound.

Sitting in absolute silence was a treat, but at the same time, it wasn’t completely comfortable. I guess this is because I experience it so seldom at home in Kharkiv. I’ve become too accustomed to the mind-cluttering noises and other distractions that are endemic to my daily life there.

So Much Noise

I live amid a cacophony of human, machine and other sounds. I have discussed these unwelcome noises in previous posts such as Substandards of Living and Just a Fond Memory.

In my thin-walled apartment, I have to put up with disparate neighbor noises ranging from arguing couples to shrieking children (which are still preferable to the drunk partiers I used to have below me). And we frequently have inebriated visitors squatting on the bench outside my bedroom window to talk, shout and argue.

The building itself offers up assorted noises like whining water pipes, the whoosh of water down the sewer outlet from a flushed toilet above me, the buzz or rattle of washing machines and other devices, and the clanging of the metal door that guards the entrance to the building. On some evenings and weekends, I am treated to the hammering, drilling and other sounds of various renovation projects.

Of course, there is the almost constant noise of traffic on the street outside the building: horns, unmuffled engines, loud stereos and, of course, the delightful screeching of under-maintained marshrutka buses.

All of this is why I keep a stash of earplugs handy for sleep time.

Away from home, the level of noise and other distractions is about the same. It’s exceedingly difficult to find the solace of true quiet anywhere in Kharkiv. It’s not the fault of Kharkiv particularly; it’s a big city, and cities by their nature are places where the hustle and bustle leaves almost no room for peace and quiet.

Here He Goes Talking about the Mountain House Again

When I lived in the Colorado mountains, quiet ruled. I gave a good description of it in the post, Just a Fond Memory:

When I first moved there, it took me a few weeks to get used to the complete silence, especially at night. The usual local noises were the gentle sound of the wind rustling through the pines and aspens, morning songbirds, the occasional cawing of a crow, and in rare instances, the barking of foxes. The nights would be especially silent… and dark.

It was wonderful… and meditative.

Why Silence Matters

Sometimes I forget how important it is to have some real silence in our lives. In silence, you can focus, you can concentrate your mental and spiritual energy, you can rise above the ordinary and reach a higher level of functioning. Silence enhances creativity, allowing space for great ideas to be realized, and it allows you to sort through the myriad of thoughts and issues to chart a more effective course for your life.

When you are distracted by sounds or other things (the Internet, for example), your mind is constantly pulled in too many directions and prevented from achieving its best. But even worse, the mind becomes weak and lazy; it comes to prefer the distractions rather than the joy of work and achievement.

To repeat a concept I wrote about in the post, The Soul, the Mind and the Heart, lack of silence allows the physical mind to more easily prevent the spiritual mind – and thus the person as a whole – from being the best it can be.

Experiencing the morning quiet of my room here makes me realize how much I miss having such silence in my life – and how much I need it. Being able to escape to silence periodically is spiritually regenerative, enhances my creativity, and bolsters my ability to keep everything else in live in the right perspective.

I need to make more room in my life for silence, and I need to create an environment in which I can get back to daily meditation – something I have let slip and neglected for far too long. For the next few days I have left here, I need to come up with a plan to defeat the distractions back in Kharkiv.

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p.s. - I have been working on this post for a few days since I started it. Now in my next-to-last night here, there are new sounds in the place: I can hear some kind of music, and a bit earlier I heard a crying child. 

Earplugs tonight.

Life at the Speed of Time

Today is the first day of 2015.

But that can’t be possible; it seems like the first day of 2014 was just yesterday. And the first day of 2013 was only last week. What’s happening here?

Everything that happened between 1 January and 31 December 2014 seems to have whizzed by in a blur. Or even worse, it sometimes feels like it never really happened… like it was just some kind of dream. That’s how the hyperspeed of time seems.

We all notice that each New Year, each birthday, each work anniversary comes faster than the previous. And as time goes on, its velocity seems to increase. It doesn’t seem so long ago that 911 was just an emergency number in the U.S., there was only one former president Bush, and no one had even heard of a leftist charlatan named Obama. It seems like it was just the other day that I visited Ukraine for the first time. And only a short while before that, I was working in Peru. I was in great shape and had hair.

None of those things (or so many more) seem like they were very long ago, but they were. So much time has flashed by in what seems like an instant.

It Wasn’t Always So Quick

When we were children in school, there was nothing slower or more frustrating than time. The clock on the wall simply did not move, especially in math class. But maybe part of that frustration was due to the fact that our school clocks had no second hands; you could not actually see the movement of time.

And summer vacations, even though they were glorious fun, also seemed to pass at a leisurely pace. That’s part of what made them so wonderful. I’m sure that for our parents, however, those summer vacations crawled by at the speed of a sleepy snail… with a handicap.

But as we get older, time speeds up. You would think that our work time would crawl by, and to be honest, sometimes it does. But usually we are so pressed for time to get things done that the available time sprints like a cheetah so that our stress levels will rise. Time is truly insidious.

Of course, nothing makes time scream by faster than the Internet. I think all of us have sat down to spend “just a few minutes” online and then realized that an hour (or three) has passed. And how many of us have missed appointments or changed our plans because the Internet literally ate our time?

More than Perception?

Often I wonder if it is just our perception that time is moving faster or if time really is accelerating. There are some who believe that everything actually IS moving at a faster pace than in years past. The further it goes, the faster it goes until each person has the lifespan of a gnat.

Do you suppose that millions of years ago gnats lived for 80 years?

But whether the laws of physics can support a real increase in the velocity of time or if it just seems to be moving faster to us, it doesn’t really matter. For every person, perception is reality, so if we perceive that it is moving faster – and many of us do – then it is.

The Past: Did it Really Happen?

Sometimes I think of the past, and none of it seems real. School days, Guam, Japan, my days at CSU, and other eras of my life – and the people in them – sometimes seem like nothing more than dreams. I know on one level that the events happened and the people were real, but they seem to have lost the feeling of reality. And often I question whether they really happened or not.

This is one of the worst effects of time’s relentless drive to increase speed. Before we can savor the moment, it is lost to the past. And then the past becomes a fuzzy recollection of faces and events that don’t seem entirely real. It’s like a movie we watched one time, long ago, and can’t completely remember.

This feeling – that the events and people of the past are just some obscure movies – is probably heightened by the fact that these situations and the people in them are each completely separate from each other. At least, this is how it is in my case. I have often moved from one geographic location to another, one cast of characters to another, with no connection from one to the next.

A person who has lived his or her whole life (or most of it) in one place has a continual connection with the place and people. In that case, there is a constant connection of the past to the present, and perhaps this keeps the past rooted in the reality of the present.

But when you've lived your life in a series of completely different situations, with no connection to each other or to the present, they have more of a tendencey to fade into a surreal kind of obscurity. Thinking about them, recalling events and faces, becomes more like just dreaming.

Maybe nothing that we consider "real life" is real at all.

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