Forever Ago
This evening I embarked on another Ultimate adventure. I went to the first winter practice of Crunch. The practice was in the evening and outdoors under the lights. When I left my hotel to walk to the field, I could see stars in the sky; there was no sign of rain anywhere. But shortly after I arrived at the field, it started to downpour. The rain continued to fall harder and harder as the practice went on. My clothes could not have been any more wet, and I could not have been any happier. When I looked up into the lights, each raindrop looked like a glittering streak in the sky. As long as kept moving I wasn’t cold at all. After running a couple drills and scrimmaging for awhile, practice ended. It was time for me to walk home. I gathered my belongings and headed out.
When it started to rain I had stashed my backpack in this small shed. I didn’t have any sort of rain cover for my bag, so it too became soaked within a couple minutes when I put it on my back. But again, I was not the lease bit annoyed at or upset by the rain. Life felt perfect, and I was happy. So, continuing with my story, before I started to walk home I had to decide what to wear on my feet. I didn’t want to wear my cleats because walking all the way home on the pavement would ruin the bottoms, and I didn’t want to wear my sneakers because they are the only pair of shoes I have with me. If they got soaking wet I would have nothing to wear on my feet for a couple days. Thus two options remained: socks or bare feet. Although walking in my bare feet sounded fun, I decided that there were too many unknown and potentially sharp objects on the ground, and it wasn’t worth running the risk of getting my foot cut open by a piece of glass. So socks it was.
My feet must have been cold, but I don’t remember feeling cold, though I do remember that I jumped in every puddle I could find and tried to make as big a splash as possible. I was quite happy and continued to jump around until I turned the corner and saw an Amsterdam canal in the rain on a dark night. I was awestruck. The water was perfectly flat and looked like I could walk across it. There were no ripples anywhere, perhaps because there were so many raindrops hitting the water that once a ripple started to form another raindrop would hit the water and thus start to create a whole new set of ripples, which then would be destroyed by the next raindrop.
After I passed the canal and was almost home, I thought about how lucky we are that we do not remember what it feels like to be in extreme pain, or to be really cold, or even to be extremely joyful. If we had the capability of actually remembering how much something hurt or how intense an emotion felt, we couldn’t keep ourselves alive. The memories would be too much. I do remember that it feels awful to be really cold, for example, but I when I remeber that it felt awful I don’t remember how my body felt. I just remember how my mind reacted to how my body felt.
When I made it home I jumped into the shower right away and got all warm. Now I am sitting all cozy in bed, trying to imagine what it must have felt like to be running around in the rain under the lights playing Ultimate. Honeslty, I can’t remember what it felt like. I just know that it felt extraordinary.
Right now even the immediate past feels like it didn’t take place recently. A couple hours ago seems like forever ago.