A la recherche

How many times have I traversed these roads? Have my tires ever rolled over the same place twice? Were the asphalt softer, would I have worn a path by now? Do the fields remember me? The horses? The trees? Every ride is new but every ride is also a summation of memories from rides past. I vividly recall details of no specific importance from training sessions months ago, years ago. It’s a feeling akin to hearing a song from adolescence and being instantly transported to a time and place far removed from where you currently find yourself.

I am reminded of an analogy my friend Ken, the composer, uses when explaining the philosophical underpinnings of his music:

Imagine a stream, a fast moving stream. The stream is turbulent and loud. A hiker happens by the stream and decides to enter the stream for a swim. As he is swimming in the stream, it not possible to distinguish the sounds his movements contribute to the overall sound of the stream from those of the natural flow of the turbulent stream. Now imagine that the totality of the present movement of the water and its consequent sounds were actually an accumulated memory of all the past swimmings in the same stream by the same hiker.

Like Barthes in Tokyo, we construct our own maps built on memories of places without markings, creating histories that only we will know, that only we will understand. This is what defines us.