consuming our experiences

I have to remind myself to just “be” sometimes.

About 6 years ago, I took a 7 day excursion to the Salar de Uyuni.  It’s a salt desert located in Bolivia and for the excursion you’re shoved into a Land Cruiser with 7 strangers and you drive about 40 hours on salt to arrive at, you guessed it, more salt!  You also get to see some flamingos, and eventually a volcano.  It’s a beautiful, difficult, tiring, journey and it usually involves some kind of food poisoning.

Getting to the Salar was the first challenge.  I got on a bus in the city of La Paz, and we drove 11 hours south to the town of Uyuni.  The ride was so bumpy and so long, that my iPod, which had a moveable hard drive in it, died about 1 hour into the trip from moving so much.  That made the 11 hours feel a lot longer.  I had to watch poorly dubbed Spanish movies on the bus instead of listen to my carefully curated playlists for the ride.  It’s also incredibly difficult to fall asleep while you feel like you’re inside of a dryer set on low heat for an endless cycle.

Once you arrive at Uyuni, the top of the salt desert, you begin your journey through the desert.  Not only are you now about 11 hours from the closest hospital, you are also now tasked with getting used to being at an elevation of 12,000 feet above sea level.  I was getting dizzy just walking around, and many people faint just from walking.

I found my way to my designated Land Cruiser, met the 7 people and the driver who I’d have to become BFFs with over the next week, and we started driving through the desert.  The driver excitedly put on his Abba cassette into the tape deck, and pulled out a large bottle of beer to quench his thirst. No GPS, no map, and barely sober, I asked him how he was able to know where he was going.

He looked at me like I was crazy and said “you just go that way”.

I can barely drive in a city without my Google Maps app telling me what to do every 30 seconds.

Throughout the trip, we would arrive at certain destinations of interest.  We’d arrive at a lake, or an unusual island, and get dropped off to explore the area. The way this generally worked was that everyone would get out of the vehicle with a camera in hand, and take as many pictures as possible for as long as we were there.

At first this was exciting.

Wow – my friends are going to be so jealous of these pictures.

Many people on the trip were mostly concerned about capturing the moments, not experiencing them – including myself.

Some would go to great lengths to take the perfect picture, with elaborate camera gear and props.  Often they would take so long composing these shots that they would miss out on exploring the whole area.

It made me think about how our consumer culture has shaped and changed what was once a sort of spiritual pilgrimage through the desert into just another Facebook photo album that you want to tag and upload as soon as you’re back on WiFi.

I wanted to rebel against this so I started to put my camera down more often – and even left it in the vehicle so I would have more time to take in the beautiful scenery and truly experience the desert instead of consume it.

Being in the wilderness is daunting.  You’re exposed to a kind of emptiness that you don’t find in the city or the suburbs.  There’s a silence that made me uncomfortable and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it.

I think I was uncomfortable because I hide from it as much as possible when I can.  I’m reading through Flipboard in the bathroom, checking my Twitter at the line-up or going through my WordPress Reader in bed.

The question I have is – when I do those things… what am I missing?

How many times do we go to concerts and spend more time taking pictures of the band than we do listening to the music?

How often are we in museums and we’re more concerned with getting through all the exhibits than we are about learning from them?

There’s a danger in consuming our experiences instead of letting our experiences shape us.

So I’m making an effort to live more in the silence.  To let it make me uncomfortable, to urge me to disconnect, and to enjoy the nuances and simplicities of life that are there every day, but that I can’t always see.