I love hiking this time of year. Snow is beautiful; it muffles sound. The forest is nearly silent. It’s easy to see which animals are out and about by their tracks, people too.
My heavy boots slow progress on the trail. As I plod along, there is a lot of stopping and starting. Removing and replacing gloves to take pictures. Stashing and unstashing my phone to protect it from the elements. The passage of time and distance is different during the winter. Nature’s lessons are still there. Maybe they are easier to see in the stark environment.
I stopped to replace my gloves after taking some pictures and casually turned to look behind me. I barely recognized the trail I had just traveled. How did I miss the way the light hit the water? And the tree that looked like a silhouette against the snow-covered hill? It’s a different perspective, I reasoned. Things look one way when you move through them and then completely different when you look back on them. I laughed a little to myself as I realized the simple and obvious truth of the idea.
How often are we busy looking ahead and miss what is right next to us? I turned around again and considered what was behind me as the past. Then I looked forward and thought of that as the future. There is a sense of curiosity and wonder that hikers have. It inspires them to put one foot in front of the other to see what is ahead. Ahead. Ahead. For miles and hours and days. What if all the enthusiasm for what’s around the next bend distracts us from the present? Eventually, we turn around to see that all of our (formerly) present moments were lost to what lay ahead. Those moments might be so lost that we don’t even recognize where we have been.