On Mt. Tam

Time is running out.

I went to the hospital this weekend. Fell while running down Mt. Tam. Learned the hard way that it is worthwhile to stop and rinse a trail wound immediately—lest the fine dirt mix with blood, turn to mud, dry, and become incredibly difficult to clean to a standard sufficient for sutures.

While the ER techs were scrubbing the wound, a 4cm long V-shaped gash that had peeled back to form a flap that was hanging back from my knee, revealing layers of flesh and fat, I was writhing. Not from pain. My knee was thoroughly lidocaine’d.

The techs—God bless them and the seriousness and pride with which they did the work—were digging around in the wound for a long time. They alternated between irrigating, scrubbing with a sponge and what looked like soap but surely was not, and picking out pieces of trail vegetation and small rocks with tweezers.

While they worked, they asked me why I was so uncomfortable—out of a philosophical and professional curiosity.

I told them that I was uncomfortable seeing and feeling the inside of my body because it reminded me of my mortality. My meat bag home is fragile and I am a powerless to change this—a fact I try desperately to forget and ignore. There is nothing I can do to prevent a gash when a rock comes into contact with a body part in an inopportune angle at an unfortunate speed. There is nothing I can do to prevent certain types of cancers. There is nothing I can do to prevent my flesh from dissolving into the dirt when the specified service lifespan has been reached.

This means you fear death, they said. And fearing death is a good thing, for it means you enjoy living.

I certainly fear death. I certainly fear the loss of my ability to experience the world, for I certainly enjoy living.

But more than death, I fear running out of time.

The better my odds of outsmarting death get, the less time I have left with the world as it is now. These things are connected, of course. Whenever I feel like I’m getting the hang of things, the world changes again. The amount of time left to experience the world as it is now is constantly running out.

The rate of change is increasing, and I can barely keep up. The changes may lead to great things for humanity—or maybe they won’t, whatever. I don’t know what the end state is, and I don’t fear bad outcomes. Maybe because I’m already trying my best to prevent them. But I do fear that I’ll spend all my time anxious and grasping for the past while the world around me changes. That my puny little meat brain won’t have the bandwidth to grasp and appreciate my life as it is at any given time before it once again changes.

I’ve had the time to savor certain things. I’m grateful for having known love in marriage. I’m grateful for having been given the option of building something of a career.

But even careers, as a concept, ended somewhere in the middle of mine. I’ll never get to experience what it was like to build a career on top of decades of knowledge, depth, understanding. That world is gone.

Will I have time to savor being a mother? Or will the world change so rapidly such that I’ll be grasping at all moments for a past version of motherhood, too frustrated by the rate of change to enjoy what I do have the privilege to experience?

Even if I live forever, will I be able to enjoy living in the future?

The doctor who sewed me up did quick work to once again put the skin-thick barrier between myself and my fear of death into place. He left the room with a remark: as soon as you can, get back on the trail.