This incredible vastness

A few years ago I stood on a hillside on the lush island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands of the South Pacific, and I gazed upon the incessantly pounding surf of the ocean that lay at my feet.

It is vast, this ocean. It is the largest single geographic feature on the planet. Those same waves wash near my home on the west coast of North America, yet there I was, in the vicinity of New Zealand, and even in my passage to Rarotonga -- a seemingly incessant ten hour flight from Los Angeles -- I had only covered a part of a body of water that, while massive, is still finite.

While I was on that hillside I was both thunderstruck by the magnificence of what I saw, yet was intensely frustrated in that I could not ever in this lifetime appreciate fully what lay before me. I was further struck by a kind of sadness that told me I would never be able to explore all the reaches of this ocean, let alone the parameters of the globe. Not in this lifetime, in any case.

Lifetimes are as finite as is the ocean, and very much smaller. My moment of pondering, and indeed revelation came about some two weeks after the horrors of September 11th, 2001 -- a day in which, despite how much we might want to deny it, the world was rendered a little different. Being in such a remote locale when the nightmare unfolded in New York, gave me pause. On the one hand, my wife and I were arguably in the safest spot in the world, but on the other there was fear in being so far away from all that was familiar.

Furthermore, for over a week following the attack so many thousands of miles away, there was no way to get off the island and back to familiar haunts, so we were trapped in an alien, albeit stunningly beautiful, oceanic enclave. I think there was maybe no time in my adult life in which I felt so vulnerable and so mortal. There was still so more of life and this world I wanted to explore -- still want to explore, so I surely didn't want that option to be over. I wanted to have the world at my disposal in my remaining years. I wanted to leave Rarotonga and go to neighboring Avarua, then French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, India, and then back to Europe for the first time in many years, all of Canada, all of the United States, and on and on. Yet, my tropical hillside musing told me I could not have that. I could only have that which my limited lifespan would permit.

The world is not an artificial globe or a map. It is profoundly real. So is life. So is death. And death restricts us. As does life. Experience has limitations. Damn!

Maybe it's just because it's a sunny spring day and my feet are unrelentingly itchy.