"No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection" -Patrick Rothfuss
It has been a long few days. I am somewhat exhausted, but very much excited to be alive. That's all I've really got at the moment...it's great to be alive.
Don't be silly, I've got way more than that.
I traveled from San Diego, CA to the Grand Canyon, AZ. It took about nine hours. During that little jaunt I stopped and got new tires because apparently mine were so worn a pebble could puncture them.
Arriving at the Grand Canyon was like passing through the gates of hell...excpet it was raining. A lot. I thought to myself, isn't this the middle of the desert? Are they getting all 5 inches of rainfall out of the way in one day?
Fortunately, the view made up for it...and then some. Words can never describe the vastness, the beauty, or the unbelievable power of nature. Trust me, I want to be able to tell you. I can't. I literally can not come up with words to describe how I felt, what I saw, or the blissful serenity it caused me.
It felt spiritual. So if you have a moment that you felt particularly connected to everything around you; as if suddenly conscious of some other dimension that always existed but you had never seen before. A dimension where you can feel, see, smell, touch, and taste everything all at once. It was something like that...
To be one. To be centered. To have seen the face of God. To have touched Nirvana. To be at peace.
I'm putting pictures up but, believe me, they don't do the place justice. Maybe I'm not that good of photographer, but my gut instinct says that the Grand Canyon is a place for painters. The landscape is too vast to all be perfect. One tiny area may be the greatest photo in the world, but when you try to show it all there is too much.
Two quotes really stuck with me as I was exploring the Grand Canyon. The first is from a book I'm reading called The Life of Pi:
"The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite."
The second is a famous quote from William Blake:
"To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour."
Both bring some much needed coherence to this explanation of my time at the Grand Canyon. Being there was like seeing all and nothing at once. As if I was both the most important person in the universe and also an insignificant collection of atoms. I was in awe. And it was awesome.
What I'm left with is this.
DFTBA. Dont' forget to be awesome. Don't forget to allow yourself to be amazed. Don't forget to take in every moment you can. Remember to be kind to others. Remember to treat yourself with the respect and love that you deserve as a remarkable human being.
Remember to love others.
Thank you for reading.