So, which way does your brain cast? Forward or back? Sideways? Are there other options? Mine is stuck on “forward” most times, forever modelling the next sequence of events in nervous partial disregard of whatever is in front of it, right now. It makes watching a movie, or particularly a few movies in a row, very difficult: some corner of my head is always working out the steps that get me from this theatre to the next, and the things that have to happen to get me there. I used to think it was a 5-films-a-day-at-TIFF problem; but once I’d stopped doing that I realized — no, it’s just a me problem.
There is very little “downtime” in my head. (This recent piece by Anne Helen Petersen is lengthy and well worth reading, and not entirely connected to my head, but, it’s not not connected. It suggests a few things I should look at.) Particularly when I am in the middle of a complex and, let’s be honest, oftentimes overwhelming work schedule, my brain will be scanning “what’s next? what’s next? what’s next?” on a ceaseless loop, a lighthouse beacon revolving forever out to sea. Even at leisure, the idea that time must be “spent” — purposefully, intentionally consumed — dogs me. Free time has within it the power to unsettle me on a level that feels deeper than my head, deeper than my bones; something jarring to my soul. As if every moment not wrung for every last drop of its juice is a moral failure.
For a long time, travelling alone was deeply uncomfortable for me, for this reason. I’m not much of a self-starter, funwise. I’d get sad, in faraway places, trying to work out things I should be doing to have a better time than I was having. It took a lot of practice to change this or, often, to release myself from the obligation of doing so. Travel to other parts of the world, with its inherent shattering of the “normal” experience of time (thank you, time zones!), presents at its outset a multiplication of challenges anyway: try acclimatizing to a new and different city, while knowing little or nothing about it, while coming in hot from the latest Peak Work Event of your career, while being zorked out of your mind on time-change and routine-change, while being naturally dehydrated from air travel, while learning not to get killed crossing the street (no really), while putting yourself under pressure to wring every last drop of juice from every free hour because to not do so would be a moral failure. It’ll do your head in.
Thankfully, for this year’s “wash the [festival? pandemic? midlife crisis?]” adventure, I chose Egypt, which meant being unstuck in more space and time than I was used to (by about 4,500 years); and, of course, also meant the Nile.
I was crossing the Nile by bridge, on foot, in late September, when I let myself let go of all my yearning and worry and simply allowed that the experience was going to be what it was going to be. I had paid a lot of money to be there. My itinerary was not wall-to-wall but it covered the necessities (and then some). And it takes great presence of mind to be in the place that you’re in after the expenditure of all those resources, all the massive energy of getting to the place and time. Shame to waste such moments on worry about what else to do.
To this Canadian white boy, Egypt is an extreme environment. It is hotter than I like it (and I don’t mind it hot), and has its aggressions of culture and behaviour that meek ol’ me took some time getting used to. (Plus, jaywalking in Cairo. A terror! A delight! I will smile thinking of it, for the rest of my life!) All of this was something I hadn’t factored in the prep, either: the fact that a few hours at a temple in Edfu could literally send you back to your bunk with heat stroke; that there was a limit to how hard I was going to be able to push the experience without working against myself. The centrepiece of the vacation was a 4-day cruise down the Nile in (for me, anyway) embarrassing levels of opulence, and I worked out pretty quickly that going to bed at 8:30 — the sun was down by 6 — just meant I could be up at 5:30. The sun was up at 6, too. I read books and I drank tea. I let the shores pass me by. Sometimes, for long hours, I stared at them, photographed them, filmed them with my brand-new-from-1976 Super 8 camera. Other times, I barely saw what was in front of me until someone remarked that this ruin or that mosque was off the port bow, and I’d languidly go and look because if there was one thing that was clear to me from the moment I arrived in that country, it was that I’d never be back this way again.
And I never missed a sunset. Never, not once, on any of all twelve of the days. I watched the sun set over the Nile nine nights in a row and then I watched it set over the Mediterranean twice, the Mediterranean who welcomed me back with a kick and a warm wave, and smelled and tasted exactly like she did when I was ten. Me and water. Me and boats. My hand over the side as we motored over to Philae and the Temple of Isis. Me on the prow of the felucca as we towed into the Botanical Garden. Me with my feet in the Nile, on the jetty below the Old Cataract, where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile. It didn’t take long for all of it to pass away, all of the scanning, forecasting, modelling the next sequence of events. I was just there. There is no “next” because there is no now. Time is a river of illusion.
