The March of Time and the Time of March

We drifted with the current. Here and there a dapple of sunlight bent against the skin of my wife's arm and a breeze peeled away the grimy layers of city that encased me like a protective cynical shell. And slowly I could feel my depths drinking in the solitude, like the roots of the tree in cool, dark, mossy soil.

What is that scent - Lilac?

The paddle-boat took us to a bend and I wondered what might lay beyond. What about this context gives me the curious anticipation of life instead of the post traumatic subway-noise disorder that relegates all sensory perception in my brain to incessant racket?

But this, now this, was life. Something palpable, something gently visceral that I could fully explore without my mind turning on the blaze from sheer sensory overload. I again let myself relax and run my fingers through the water....Then thought better of it.

True, I couldn't hear any car horns. I couldn't hear loud rap music. I couldn't even see a building. But I was still in Brooklyn. I was amazed that one could find such a remote place in this city. But for one afternoon we drifted along in the sun. We were wrapped in the kind of peace and beauty that I could not see anywhere else since I moved here two years before. And all the weight of years, all the damp corridors of the subway, all the cacophony of noise that was our constant companion seemed but a ripple on the surface of the water. I could almost feel the fabric of time stretching back through my ancestors, the immensity of it- the incontrovertible evidence that no matter how much we rush about, no matter how we busy ourselves, we will not make more. It continues inexorably on, at a slow and peaceful rhythm. And we might just be a little happier, we might actually experience the very little time we do have, if we did the same.