When the Mountaintop Experience is out of Focus

I had a mountaintop experience yesterday but it wasn't very good. Tracey and I were on a one-day tour of the Dolomites in northern Italy and after seven hours on a coach, we were finally given some free time for a cable car ride to the top of a mountain from where we were promised the most fantastic view the region had to offer. Our guide even gave us a guarantee that the experience would be spiritual but there was a catch. Our spiritual experience had to be completed at a pace because in just over an hour we needed to be back on the coach to travel back down the 27 hairpin bends that had taken us to this height. It's hard to have an authentic spiritual experience under this kind of time pressure and I haven't even mentioned the fact that I was in urgent need of a loo stop.

Despite all this I had high hopes for the mountaintop. I recalled visiting the Rocky Mountains for the first time many years ago and getting this incredible sense of coming home in a place I'd never been before. Back in Wyoming I just stopped and stared at the view, drank it all in so effectively that my thirst for that moment is still being quenched to this day. Yesterday I skipped all that and reached for my camera. We were on a schedule and had to be back on the coach. There wasn't sufficient time to drink it all up so I would snap a few pictures and hopefully get something out of the moment later, back at home when the holiday was over.

Is this how we now are? Are we so obsessed with digital representations of the moment that the moment itself is lost to us?

After a few minutes, Tracey took the camera off me to take a few snaps herself. At this moment the camera battery ran out and thinking myself fantastically well-organised, I told her that I had packed a spare battery that very morning, which she could find in the side pouch of the camera case. However, further investigation revealed that I had been less alert than I thought and had, in fact, packed a chocolate from my hotel pillow instead of a battery. Oops.

The absurdity of the situation - going up a mountain only to discover you have taken a chocolate instead of a camera battery - continues to entertain Tracey and the 28 friends who have so far 'liked' my mention of the incident. Still there are interesting points to ponder. How many of us are so digital now that special events are not real, not quite authentic, unless they are photographed, shared or 'liked'? How many of us are so used to being frenetically busy that we habitually hurry through moments that ought to be savoured and in so doing entirely miss their significance, grumbling, for example, because it's too bright to see the view from the mountaintop on the tiny screen on the back of a camera when we ought to be drinking in the moment and not worrying too much about the pictures we take?

Now I'm a day older but maybe not wiser and I'm sitting by the clear blue water of Lake Garda writing this. We had big plans for the day but we came back to the hotel early because it is incredibly hot even for here. Tracey is swimming in the lake along with a duck and her brood of ducklings. The sound of the water lapping against the shore is soothing and the coffee I'm drinking tastes good. I have been sitting here for ages and have no idea what the time is.

If I stay here long enough I think this could count as a mountaintop moment. Good job I haven't got my camera.

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