Time and Space
Our perception of these dimensions has already become warped on this trip. We see and experience so much and meet so many people and are in so many places (despite moving relatively slowly) that our path-weary brains are finding it hard to process it all effectively, especially I imagine for Chris and Seth who also have music on their minds to write and rehearse and perform each night.
Some of the ways these shifts of temporal and spacial perspective are happening are interesting. For example, like the opposite of a deep space telescope looking at the cosmos’ distant and ancient light, the further we can see ahead, (and often with headlands and mountains and bays in front of us, that’s quite far) the further forward in time we are seeing. On Holyhead mountain the other day we could see 2 weeks of time laid out in the landscape of the coast either side of us, both where we’ve been and where we’re headed in the coming days.
Another way is that, despite being quite early into the project still, we all struggle to remember what day something happened or when we stayed at a particular place, or something that happened a matter of days ago feels like another lifetime. The last couple of days we’ve got a lift from venue to accommodation and gone in just a few minutes what has taken us hours to walk, which is disheartening and disorienting but just a part of touring in this way, especially on the loop of Anglesey.
Perhaps in a more simple way, what we consider to be a normal length of a walk has raised significantly. People will ask what we’ve done today and we’ll casually answer 15, or 18 or 22 miles, to looks of alarm bordering on horror, with occasional admiration thrown in.
We’ve become quite adept at judging speed and distance and time- we pretty consistently walk at 3mph, allowing us to schedule lunch stops etc but also apparently giving us a super human ability to guess how long ago something was. Seth scarily accurately just felt 17 minutes the other day (that popular duration), almost to the second. Let’s see if after 60 days these new found abilities are weakened or supercharged.