Infinity at Dusk

Pure white sand, blue-green ocean, utter solitude, and a guitar. It’s hard to find an experience more aesthetically pleasing. Relaxed in the evening sun, I faced the sea and picked through some Creed, and a little bit of Boston, noting how sore my fingers were from lack of practice. I’d bought the acoustic for about a hundred dollars in Byron Bay. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t walk by a guitar in someone’s house without picking it up and playing it… a full month without one had been absolute torture. So it was a good buy. And traveling by myself could get a bit lonesome; it’d be nice to have the company of a few self-produced tunes.

I dropped the low E-string down to a D and starting rolling through some Switchfoot; melodious acoustic rifts, mellow and soothing. “Stars lookin’ at our planet, watching entropy and pain…” I sang in unison with the rhythm of my pick. “And maybe start to wonder how the chaos of our lives could pass as sane.”

I love Switchfoot. I love how their songs ebb and flow, how John Foreman’s almost lackadaisical voice floats through sublime guitar pieces; sleepy, wandering musings. “I’ve been thinking ‘bout the meaning of resistance, of a hope beyond my own…” How they wax philosophical, explore the deeper, often existential, questions of life and death and other mysteries. I felt I could connect with these sorts of questions, particularly given the scope of my undertaking. While I occasionally met people in various places and had a bit of company, the vast majority of my journey has been – and likely will continue to be – in solitude.

It’s astonishing how embedded noise is in our lives. There’s always noise. We talk, the television blares, the phone rings, and the iPod fills the spaces inbetween. We’re accustomed to this audible blend, so much so that silence is as deafening as it is sudden. Faced with it, we can barely stand it. It’s maddening. Faced with days and days of it myself, I began to really articulate why. And after much deliberation, I realized that distractions, such as we surround ourselves with day to day, are mechanisms which we construct to keep from having to think.

Perhaps we are afraid to think. It is clearly evident in our lives how precariously our happiness is balanced; a fickle thing, it can be easily toppled by a trifling, and increased by the same. To reflect on ourselves and to consider our condition – our miniscule place in the midst of a vast sea of infinities – is nothing short of horrifying. Blaise Pascal said it perfectly in Pensées: “…let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence.; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, [the] universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the Infinite?”

Who wants to ponder this? No one… American Idol is on, and there’s too much to do after that. And solitude is just so damn boring. After all, ignoring gravity means it doesn’t exist, right? That’s why we can spread our arms and fly, right?

But we can’t fly.

We crash and burn.

Maybe it’s time we started reflecting on this. I strummed a few more bars, finishing the song: “Suddenly the infinite and penitent begin to look like home…” A harmonious closure followed and I noted the strong hue of dusk. The sea was a strange sort of topaz, ever darkening. As I trudged up the shore through the sand I noticed the first few stars glimmering in the oncoming night. Two tiny stars, visible in front of many more, many more than I could ever count. I gazed at infinite; there’s a lot of it.