How to Cheat Death (or, Time Regained)

I was working on my computer, completely absorbed, and when I finally looked up, I couldn’t remember what country I was in. I was familiar with the room: I knew my desk, and the orange-yellow walls, and I knew that through the door was a hallway that led to the bathroom and a second bedroom and the living room and the kitchen, and in the living room were striped armchairs. I knew all that. I just couldn’t remember where the apartment was located. France? I thought. No, no. Greece?

It was a question of more than just geography: since I couldn’t remember where I was, I also couldn’t remember when I was. The type of traveling that I was doing, in which I spent up to six weeks in each main location, meant that I had developed routines, built relationships, experienced whole worlds. Tugging on a place name would cause a whole bucket of associations to tumble out with it. If I am in Norway, it is summer. If I am in Spain, there is a dog in the house.

As usual whenever I think I’ve had an original thought, Proust has gotten there first: at the beginning of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), Marcel describes how, after waking but before opening his eyes, his mind automatically tries to picture the room that he is in, and therefore what part of his life he is in. If his body “imagines itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy,” that meant he must be “in the country with his grandfather” and therefore that “Mamma never came to say goodnight!” But then there “would come up the memory of a fresh position; the walls slid away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup’s house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o’clock, they will have finished dinner!”

The self is never just the self: the self has a context that it fits itself to or defines itself against. And in those strange, lurching moments, when I wasn’t able to identify my context, I felt a sense of terror. I suppose that is the price you pay.

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And yet there is a reward: time has become incredibly dense. All of my jobs are online, which allows me to do them as I’m traveling. Because of that, my experience of a city is very different than that of someone who is on vacation: it is not a “pause” in my normal life, during which exceptions can be made. It is my normal life. Since I am doing habitual actions (going on runs, going to the grocery store), I create routines, which gives the time a sort of solidity, a reality, that you don’t get when you’re on vacation. In an issue of her Substack, Sarah Elaine Smith writes:

One of my favorite thing about being alive is all of the eras. The minor ones, I mean—the ones where you have a sudden love of a certain breakfast and eat it every day, the ones where you happen to hang out with a certain friend every Thursday for dinner because you both have some short-term scheduling situation which throws you together. You get a minor version of this when you take out your winter coat for the first time and find the accidental time capsules in your pockets consisting of a chapstick from a national park gift shop and a ticket stub and maybe a precious bracelet you’ve been looking for. Currents and tides are always moving. Meaning is briefly assembled, habit condenses occasionally. And then falls apart.

The kind of traveling that I’m doing sharpens this process, since changing places delineates each “era” so distinctly. Time has become so dense; it feels so full.

This does not mean that my days are crammed with activities—quite the opposite. Much of my life is quiet. Rather, the key to density is the combination of repetition and change: both are necessary. The repetition makes it an “era,” and the change means there are more frequent, shorter eras. Repetition + change = density. Six months contain three totally distinct and complete worlds, which creates the feeling of “more” having happened in a finite period of time.

That density of time also results in changes of the self. I am not “me” just plopped into a different setting, like putting Felicity’s clothes on your Samantha doll. Because our contexts inform our selves, I feel as though I am a different self altogether. For six weeks, I am this person; then for the next six weeks, I am someone else, who performs different habitual actions in a different cultural setting. I am traveling because I want to learn more about the world, yes, but I’ve begun to realize that there’s another, ultimately more interesting project: I am trying to see how many different selves I can have. If context defines the self, then theoretically, I am infinite. “It feels a bit like cheating in life,” a friend of mine said (in a good way, I think), when I tried to explain this to him. I do have the impression of having more, somehow—more selves, more eras, more lives.

This is not something that you can get from traveling quickly. Even if you’re traveling for a long time, moving from rapidly place to place tends to create the opposite effect: there is a sort of blending together of places. You can’t remember where you are—not because you’ve had so many different lives so quickly, but because the destinations have been pouring over you without their leaving any mark. You swim through place after place until they all seem the same, but you still stay your same essential self: you speak your language, you wear the same shirts. Slow travel is the opposite: if you allow yourself to stand still for long enough, the place will permeate you, penetrate you, until it begins to be a part of you. Nothing blends together: on the contrary, each era feels so distinct.

It is also powerful that I am the one creating these selves. If I am walking along a road in the middle of an island in the middle of the Aegean Sea, a random place I really have no business being in, it’s because I decided to come here. I clicked some buttons and typed in some information and then I got into a flying metal tube with wings and now I am this person in this place in the middle of this specific era. You can just do that—did you know that? It’s still shocking to me that I can just do that. This post puts it well:

Someone wrote in the comments:

I have many privileges, not least the schools I attended (excellent, making it easy for me to find online work), the way I look (white enough for the benefits of “passing” but also “ambiguous” enough to conceivably be a local in many places), and my passport (American), but I am not, as people sometimes assume when they see how much I travel, extremely rich: I grew up in a middle class family that sent me to private school instead of buying health insurance, and I now make under $30k USD/year. And yet I can just do that!

It does feel, honestly, like I’m getting away with something.

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In addition to being denser, time is also slower. Even on vacation, the first few days often feel long, don’t they? Because everything is new, you create more new memories, giving you the impression that a lot has happened, which makes the time feel larger. I am experiencing that almost constantly: since I’m always in new places, my brain flags most of the things I come into contact with as novel and different and worthy of remembering in detail. I know very little about the brain, but I suspect that I may genuinely, physiologically be making memories in my brain more rapidly than any time since childhood. (Perhaps that’s why time is so slow in childhood: for children just as for travelers, everything is new.) And it’s exhilarating: everything feels so vivid. When you’re distracted, time slips away from you in chunks of whole weeks; now, I feel immersed in it, experiencing every second.

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But even though time is slower, it is also more urgent. I’ve been thinking a lot about The Good Place and its conclusion that meaning comes not from abundance, but from restriction. Knowing that you only have six weeks in a place infuses everything with poignancy: it’s just enough time to develop habits and attachments, but little enough time that you are conscious they won’t last. Everything becomes precious.

Such a hard time limit also forces the accepting of limitation. The list of things that I want to do in any place—museums, restaurants, sights, etc.—is always bigger than the number of free days that I have. I must necessarily choose; I can’t fool myself by saying that I’ll get around to it “later” or “one day,” because I know that, soon, I will leave. You cannot do it all. Whenever I leave a place, I’m forced to confront the list of things that I didn’t do, and now will probably never do. Never! But sitting with that harsh truth every month or so has been, I think, good for me psychologically, because it’s a metaphor for life itself. You won’t be able to do all of the things you wanted to do. It’s not possible. And accepting that brings a kind of joy and peace. In his excellent Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes:

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you do actually have time for – and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

When I was in Venice, my apartment was about eight minutes away on foot from the Galleria dell’Accademia, a museum I was enchanted by from my very first visit. All too soon, I had to leave to go back to work, but I knew I was going to come back. Later, I went to the museum’s website and saw that, although a single entry cost €12, a yearlong membership cost €40. I bought the membership, and with that purchase, committed to taking advantage of it. I visited the museum for about an hour almost every day after that. My “free” (that is, already-paid-for) entry meant that, instead of rushing through the museum in order to take everything in, I allowed myself to take my time: most days, I would spend my entire hour in a single room. I didn’t go to any other museums in Venice (I know! I know), but I had already made my choice, and I was happy with it. What does rushing through a museum ever really do for us? It feels more like a checklist item than anything else. Spending this kind of deep time with one museum changed me, educated me, moved me. I didn’t go to the Doge’s Palace. That’s okay. My sacrifice of Venice’s other museums imbued the Galleria with even more meaning for me, because I was aware of what I was sacrificing. As Burkeman says, “you come to realise that missing out on something – indeed, on almost everything – is basically guaranteed. Which actually isn’t a problem anyway, it turns out, because ‘missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.” (Impossible not to think of The Good Place when Burkeman contemplates heaven’s unlimited time: “Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares?”) Knowing that you have made a sacrifice allows you to focus, to really be present for something, which also slows down time.

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For more than ten years, I’ve had a digital sticky note on my laptop that lists, wishfully, habits I’m urging myself to develop. “Meditate!” reads one of the items. Alas, I’ve never been able to develop the habit, mostly for the reason that I hate it.

But I do feel that the kind of traveling that I’m doing means that I’ve become more “mindful” than I ever was before. Partially, this is because of what I previously mentioned: knowing that your time is limited means that you treasure it more. But the impermanence of it all also plays a role. Since I often go to countries where I don’t know anyone, I spend a lot of time talking to strangers. These connections are temporary, but in some ways, their transitory nature adds a different kind of profundity: the experience of living is, after all, being in a certain place at a certain time, and if you have a one-hour chat with someone you’ll never see again, you’re participating fully in that exact moment, that place-time combination. There is no “building” towards anything; there is just what it is.

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When discussing standard adult ennui (“as we get older, life gets routinised – we stick to the same few places of residence, the same few relationships and jobs”), Burkeman warns against “cram[ming] your life with novel experiences” as a solution. Instead, he urges us to take advice from mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young: “[P]ay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and ‘your experience of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long.’” This is a density of time created through skill and effort; the way that I’ve been traveling is, maybe, a sort of cheat code. Instead of training my mind to be more mindful, I’ve stumbled upon a tool that forces mindfulness upon myself. (Perhaps this explains my feeling of “getting away with something.”)

This brings me to something that has been floating uneasily in the back of my mind this entire time: if I had such a wonderful experience going “deep” instead of “broad” with Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia, why travel at all? Why couldn’t I do the same thing with a museum right in my own backyard? It’s not as though New York has a deficit of them. But I don’t. I could, but I don’t. I need the excuse of travel – and the hard limit of a certain number of weeks – to create that feeling of urgency. Indeed, another benefit of travel is that my limited time means that I don’t feel guilty about leisure, since I can justify it to myself as “taking advantage” of wherever I am. At home, I would never spend an afternoon idly: there’s too much work to do, writing to revise, books to read, friends to see. But yesterday, a Sunday, I walked to the Bosque de Chapultepec, an enormous park in Mexico City twice the size of New York’s Central Park, and spent the afternoon doing… nothing. I had brought a book, but I didn’t read it. Instead, I walked around and took in the big, shady trees and listened to vendors hawking their wares and watched families picnicking, and I had a few hours of complete, perfect happiness. What a wonderful park, I kept saying to myself. What a wonderful city. How lucky I am to be here. But was I happy because I was traveling? Or was I happy because traveling allowed me to do something I never would have if I were at home: slow down, treasure my limited time, live in the present, all the things they’re always telling you to do?

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Occasionally in my life, the following question has come up in discussion: Would you rather know you’re about to die, or would you rather death come unexpectedly and painlessly? I have always felt strongly that I want the former; the idea of dying peacefully in my sleep terrifies me. I want, before it’s all over, one final gift: the privilege of saying goodbye. In a way, I’m giving myself that exact thing with my life of “eras,” over and over and over again: each of my selves comes to an abrupt end, but not before I’ve appreciated every moment of it. I’ve toyed with making the eras longer, but the pain of “not enough” is what gives them their meaning. Slow travel is a constant reminder that nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it would be more enlightened of me to accept that—but I won’t. I am going to make the time as dense as I possibly can, for as long as I possibly can.

[Written in July 2023]