On passing time
The end of the year, a passing moment as so many others, but also a reference point to attach meaning to, to grasp something of all that time that has flowed through our hands and filter out something that eludes those fleeting moments.
Looking out over the streets of Barcelona from my hospital room, I cautiously try to regain some of those fleeting moments. I try to hold them close to me, embrace them. Slowly I find the courage to long for those moments once again.
Laughing and climbing with friends while the warm Catalan sun caresses our skin until she sets slowly behind the hills, covering everything in a fairytale purple light until also that light fades, leaving us and our projects in the dark, finishing them by headlight before stumbling back to the van for a cold beer and some banter.
To a cold, icy wind cutting our faces, only answered by a stoic grin because there is no place on earth where we would rather be than right there, in the cold, in the wind, in this wonderful world of snow and ice, surrounded by jagged peaks for whom we aim. To be in the mountains connected by rope and friendship.
To dinner tables where the most important ingredient on the table is not the food, however great it may be, nor the copious amounts of fine wine, but the people that surround the table. Conversation, a meeting of minds. Connection. Friends and family that form the solid base for all those adventures we constantly seek, built of a material no granite however hard it may be can compare to.
For the last couple of days I dared not let my mind wonder into these territories for too much. My world consisted of the ceiling to which my view was bounded. Lying straight in a hospital bed with my neck firmly braced in a fixed position. Don’ t move. Constantly trying to keep the perspective close. The future too unsecure to find a hold to fixate on. The next hour, the next step to be taken already such a foggy realm where nothing is sure and time becomes fluid as it constantly stretches out in front of you, that it almost becomes impossible to find structure and meaning in the current time and place, let alone in what lies beyond.
An island in the sea of chaos that is a foreign E.R. Constant movement and action around, but never sure when the actions will be connected to you. The reality being hardly ever, so you lay and wait, try not to hope too much and sink away in time, letting it all pass like clouds.
Time passes and passes as the hospital days lying down rack up. But as always, with time there are the first signs of healing popping up. Like the first snowdrops emerging from a world still stuck in winter I sense improvement in a body that is still beaten down.
As they wheelchair me towards a second MRI we pass a hospital window bathing in the warm winter sun. Caught off guard by this tactile sensation, I feel a vitalistic longing starting to swell in me and I cannot help a small teardrop emerging in the corner of my eye.
After the second MRI, for the first time I dare to ask what the doctor thinks my perspective looks like. The answer of a possibly long recovery that might entail an operation but good chances of recovery opens up the perspective I had not yet dared turn my gaze upon. He is not the first to tell me how incredibly lucky I have been.
As I await my return home looking out my Barcelona hospital window I try not to think of all that was lost, but of the world that there is to be regained.