The finer points of time travel

So I'm sitting at the airport in Buenos Aires waiting for my flight to arrive (we board in 15 minutes and they haven't put up the gate yet...) and I'm thinking about time.  Not only to avoid missing my flight (which seems entirely possible) but also in an entirely different sense.  When you travel, time changes.  You go from one time zone to another, you encounter cultures that eat later, go to bed later, wake up later, and that affects how you view time.  But when you go to a place that has no time zone, a place where all time zones come together to a single point, time starts to become less and less relevant.  You start to see how it really is a human construct.  Couple this with almost total daylight and your in for a strange trip indeed.  I was speaking with Carol Devine (a special guest invited by Lindblad and totally amazing and nice person) and Alex (a houlie from Hawaii who was on our expedition and equally nice) about this a few minutes ago as we collectively waited to depart for our respective homes, and we all agreed that time had blurred.  I mean really blurred.  As a group of people, we really weren't together that long.  But it sure seemed like it.  I often found myself on the bow of the ship at 2 am, standing stunned in totally amazement - and that does something to you.  When you wake up at 7:30, and you attention is fixed on surroundings that defy true description, your eyes searching the ice covered horizon for birds, or scanning the blue black and sometimes gray water for seals and whales, you go somewhere new.   The light is almost always the same.  Its like some sort of lo-fi time travel, and it happened to all of us.  We weren't just traveling a long distance from point A to point B, we seemed to slip out of the temporal and into the infinite.  The timescale used by whales when they were spotted surfacing outside of the lounge window at 11 pm, or killer whales harassing one year old humpbacks at 5 am.   Real time people.  Real time.

When you think of it, our mundane world, with all of its buzzers and alarms and officious rationing of days and hours and minutes and seconds, you can see that stuff is a total human construct.  Its a construct that really separates us from the world we live on.  We've decided work begins at x:30, and lunch is at y o'clock.  But it isn't.  None of those numbers mean anything.  I imagine a world where we work when we're inspired, and we eat when we're hungry.  A world where we hunt when its the time to hunt, and we move on when its time to move on.   A more primal world, a world in synchronicity with the natural world around us.  Its crazy the artifice we've built up in what is really a short time frame.  Think of the collective tumult of humanity - 2ish million years.  This rationing of time is a new phenomenon. We really just started to live by the clock - for most of our collective history we operated in accord with the world around us.  Fast forward to now.   In the winter when I wake up to go to work, its dark.  When I get home, its dark.  But I (we) pretend things are the same as the other seasons; we go to work, get home, go to bed as though things are the same.  When get shoved into the slipstream, you can see it ain't so.   When humpbacks are eating dinner at midnight, you know that they aren't wearing a watch.

In our little human microcosm, we aren't going back.  We're actually chopping time up with an ever sharper knife, into ever smaller pieces.  And its making us nuts.  Anxiety is through the roof, as is depression, as is the disconnection with the natural world.  The more we build a world that operates on its own, the more lonely it makes us.   The more we build this world the more we (well, some of us) realize it really doesn't work.  We're animals.  Deep down, we're drawn to the same rhythms that run the natural world.  Shutting them down means that we're losing something really important, something innately human.  Its a touchstone to home, a way our hand lays on the sacred and timeless.   Its worth examining where we came from and where we're headed.  Take some time to think it about it.  ;)

Now, when does that plane board again?