Winter Sketches: The Track of Time

Last Updated on August 1, 2016 by Patrick

There is the track of time which is the expression exceptionally used by people, meaning that it is used in special cases, not all the time. It refers to the exit from the bundle of temporal fantasies in which we regularly are and entering us into a zone in which we do what we like. The Americans use to have a word for this saying that “time flies when you’re having fun”.

People, usually, we never listen to Nature. And when we are hiking in the mountains, when we look at the landscape, this impresses us somehow, and if we are opened it can make us be ourselves again. It takes us out of the paradigms of the comfort zones in which we lived and it brings us to the light of the eternal, moment by moment unknown. Seemingly, time is no longer the same and we see reality. Life is no longer a dream but a certainty, something that surprises us, something that takes us out of what we thought life is and what we think of ourselves. It resets our thinking system. And then it also amazes us.

There is also the matter of losing the track of time when we are preoccupied with one thing, or the other, with different things. Thus, we no longer know what time it is, in what hour are we, not having the control over the countdown of the events in our lives and, in this way, we lose their track, so to speak. Do we forget of ourselves? May be. But how to remember of ourselves? Is it a psychological question reserved only for an elite people who have this kind of knowledge? Everyone is one’s own psychologist. Psychology is an inherent and natural thing in us. One who starts practicing it thus discovers that it was always there within oneself.

It is also not a matter of a rich, bourgeois intellectual elite, as it is said, and even the poor beggar on the corner of the street has this instrument at hand if he looks within himself.

In the mountains I have learned that if I look within myself I find them there as well, not only on the Valley of Prahova, or on any other river’s valley from our country, or somewhere in the northern parts of our lands. As Albert Camus said that “in the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer”. And then, why does it snow in winter?… :)

One cannot lose the track of time, because it never existed.

The track of time is not the one we think it is. Nature is dual, things coming and going. They are just phenomena. Let us never get to play with them without ever asking for the permission of their Creator! We don’t know what we unleash, what we may unbalance in this way, and we lose the track of time and space. Suddenly, the world is no longer as we know it.

Do you know the story of Chronos? It was the God of Time who devoured his children. All things have the tendency to be consumed or recycled. Nature always recycles. Her resources always entering the cycle. If we are greedy, avaricious or wasteful, or we cause the stagnation of resources in Nature or their faster than normal consumption. Either the abuse or the refusal, either we keep to much for ourselves or we give too much to others. Are these neverending?