Measure of Things

Mt. Pulag
Benguet
October 28 - 31, 2005

It is easy to become fixated towards the empirical measure of things. We rely on it even if it is physically impossible for us to determine the difference anyway between say, fifteen and sixteen kilometers, or five hours and five hours and fifteen minutes. Without the labels or the watch that is strapped in our wrist, these lengths, spans and durations are imperceptible; in a word, meaningless.

But why this tendency of thought to gravitate towards this method where we split everything into mental-bite-sized chunks? I theorize that when we are faced with the prospect of having to speak about or describe our experiences, we force our minds to perceive in the logical sphere so as to form linguistic representation of what was experienced. In a sense, we become a difference engine.

Liken it to:

"Man, I've been to the roof of Luzon! That's 2,922 plus meters above sea level. That's the second highest point in the whole of the Philippines. The trip took us a total of three days. The assault from Camp 2 took about 45 minutes..."

As opposed to:

"Ooooh... That is huge."

It is basically living our lives in accordance to our nature. Call it following our biology, our cellular make up. All in all, everything that we do or tend to do rely on what our biology allows us to do. Without those synapses in the right place, and firing the right way, you can't be Arnold, Arnold.



Affinity towards accuracy or perhaps the semblance of it, and the ability to communicate these thoughts without degrading the meaning as it is passed on from one pair of ears to another – I can see how this trait may have given our ancestors a clear advantage over their subjective cousins. I can imagine how nature would have favored a biological configuration that promotes this trait – how people who understood numbers pretty well were better equipped in calculating the odds of decimating neighboring and competing communities.

Why now must I take note that there were around 60 of us who climbed Mt. Pulag on October 28? Why now must I tap on my mobile phone obscure details such as the number of jeeps that took the whole team up the Department of Environment and Natural Resources' field office, or how long it took from DENR to the Ranger Station? Why must I note how much lunch cost on the roadside diners we stopped at? How will that benefit my specie?

I feel like an ant scouting for food and upon finding it, go back to the colony to blog the details.

I feel as if I've degraded my experience in the wilderness when the thought of having to report back comes to mind. It comes to mind as if it were a civic duty of sorts. It breaks down my mountain to meters and logistical units. It slices the team into non-intersecting groups, each self contained and with a designated group leader. It ranks and relegates my mountain to the second highest point in the Philippines when in fact, looking at it and standing upon it, its majestic stance is beyond comprehension. Its girth is beyond any estimate that the human mind can conjure. As a mere passive spectator to the drama that nature presents every day for millions of years, why have the audacity to relegate Mt. Pulag to second place?

Stand there. Feel the blast of the cold wind on your face. Trace the contours of the mountain and make sense of it in your mind. Try to read the hand of the wind as it shuffles clouds and mist in front of your eyes. You will be awed. You will feel as if you were drowning. It should end there. But that doesn't rest comfortably with you. You are not comfortable if you feel incapable of taking all of it in. In place of understanding which you are used to, you become mystified, overwhelmed, you will attribute it to a higher power. You will then be satisfied upon giving it a name – a name that takes many forms: a mystery, a wonder, a gift. Then that's when the butchering begins. That's when you will churn numbers and rank it, cut it down, make an abstraction until the mountain is no more than an altitude profile in a piece of paper which you hope to post in your blog soon.

Then this whole discourse led me to think: Is this the limit of our perception? Is this how far our senses and constructs can take us? Is this all that a person can extract from an eighty year existence?