Two hikes in the last week have driven home the themes of the summer for me: perception and perspective. Hike number one took me on a trail in China Camp that hugs the coastline. It’s a trail I used to hike quite often, and I hadn’t been on it in quite some time. And while the view was beautiful, looking out over the bay, I suddenly realized that this trail was nowhere near as challenging as I remembered it. I barely broke a sweat. Enjoyed myself immensely, but questioned my choice to skip the gym for it. It was also much shorter than I remember. This odd experience of “misremembering” something so acutely drove home the point that forms the basis of my personal growth lately: that we create our own realities/”truths”. Perhaps the reality of a former version of myself was that the trail was challenging and lengthy. And my reality now is that it is not. And someone else’s reality may be yet a third view of the trail. Perception. It’s what makes a born-again Christian think George W Bush is the best thing since sliced bread, and me think he is the spawn of Satan. After mentally absorbing this point on the hike, I resolved to enjoy the hike anyway by focusing on other aspects of it rather than the physical exercise, and create yet another perception of it, create a new reality; namely, that it was an excellent hike for viewing nature and processing things mentally at a leisurely pace. As on cue, I rounded a curve, and came face to face with three deer, grazing next to the trail. They observed me for a moment and I them, trying to put out a serene demeanor, and they went back to eating. 

My hike today came late in the day, and as I headed up the trail, the sun cast that soul-satisfying golden glow over the hills and the dried grasses. It was absolutely breathtaking, and I thought, I truly live in the most beautiful place on the planet. I hiked quite far up the hill, and then stood on top of the ridge watching the sun set for a while, steeped in thought and the stillness of the moment. So when I headed back down the trail, the sun had dipped below the horizon. The golden glow was gone, it was getting dark, and the wind began to pick up, whistling through the canyon and rustling the grasses. There was a sort of lonely feel to it; the mood had shifted, and I saw the same hills that had been bathed in yellows and oranges from an entirely different perspective when shaded in the blues of an approaching night. There was still a beauty to it, but it was a brooding, restless beauty, with wild black tangled hair and a strange look in her eye, not the docile, round-hipped blond milkmaid smiling in the wheatfield from a half hour before. Perspective. It can change everything. It can make your bad day look like a party. It can make your crippling physical ailments look like petty complaints. It can make you look at your one true love through new eyes and wonder what the hell you were ever thinking. And it can make you look at someone you never looked at twice before and think you must have been mad never to notice how beautiful they are. And maybe, hopefully, when the light’s just right, it can make you look at yourself and wonder that too. How bout that.

 

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