A Fleeting Experience

December 26th, 2008 admin Posted in Experiences, Philosophy | No Comments »

We are driving towards Orlando in our overloaded Pontiac Vibe. Anant is in the driver’s seat; Kavita is sitting behind him, with a mountain of boxes and bags filled with camping stuff, food, clothes, maps, cameras and stuff for our week-long road trip almost leaning onto her to her right and from behind her. We are listening to Ira Glass’s “This American Life” CD. Up until a few minutes ago, I was reading the New Yorker magazine that Anant had brought with him from California. But as the light outside faded, I could not read any more and my mind wandered.

I was looking out of my passenger-side window when I noticed a tall tower with two red lights, horizontally arranged atop the tower, a thin cloud of mist in front of it and a dark night behind. To be more accurate, I only saw the lights, and I imagined the tower’s existence. As those lights were flying past me, I craned my neck for a few seconds trying to keep my sights on those two red lights. In those seconds I realized something. The fleeting vision of those lights behind a cloud of dark, foggy mist and my fruitless attempt at trying to hold on to that view made me realize how I (we all, perhaps) crave focus. We want to be able to hold on to experiences. One after the other after the other. I realized, also, how fleeting the nature of all experiences is. What you experience, what you take in, is different from what you set out to experience, what you probably wanted to take in. The moment that you want to experience, is past by the time you actually are able to take it in. In this constant rush of fleeting images, fleeting thoughts, fleeting sensory experiences, we keep chasing that impossible goal. We crave an experience we can truly and completely call our own – an experience we can hold by the scruff of its neck and do with what we choose to. But alas, it unfailingly slips out of our grasp, always leaving us with a few tattered thoughts and shadowy images – and even these leftovers belong to a different moment altogether, not the one we were trying to go after. And what you take in is really what you want to take in. Can you ever truly experience a moment, when time keeps the scenery ever-changing? What you can hold on to is that which is not changing with time – that which is independent of time. And maybe the only such thing, which is within you control, is that which is within you. That which you can truly experience, necessarily, has to be an idea that is of your own creation – an idea that which you can readily recreate, that which is truly obedient. Does that mean that, that which is outside, that which is real, is really not? And that which is hypothetical, imaginary, and, obedient, is the reality we can experience?

These rhetorical questions apart, one other thing these fleeting lights maybe helped me see is one reason why I like photography. For once, I can hold time nearly still. A shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second is pretty close to being momentary for me – short enough to not allow multiple thoughts to cross my mind. And when I look at that picture later, I can study every detail at my leisure, without the nagging fear of something discreetly changing in the bottom left corner of my view while I was busy breathing in the top right.