Waktu di antara hujan

Let’s start with an image.

Almost every afternoon it rains, hard. The morning might be densely humid and airless, you steam and sweat; then just after lunch you start to feel a breeze; you see patches of blue in the sky between fast-moving cloud patterns reforming mercurially; the sky clouds up fully, darkens, bursts; God turns on the tap full blast. My favorite moments are those in-between ones right before or after the rain, the waktu di antara hujan. The lighting and the cloud patterns are incredible. Yesterday the rain ended maybe fifteen minutes before I needed to bike home from where we had our afternoon session. It’s only four minutes’ ride home, and I was feeling alive and invigorated and didn’t want to rush to go back indoors. So on my way back to my street I turned off the main road onto the narrower road I always pass that cuts through the sugarcane and rice fields. Instantly the sky opened up all around me. Freed from the confines of leafy trees and house skylines, it was boundless. The clouds were huge, lightly pink-hued, fresh, above; I was sailing across a thin stripe of paving in a sea of green below, stripes of cloud reflected in rows of paddy water.

It was so perfect I wanted a photo of it. I’ve taken so few photos since coming here, and I’ve seen such amazing things. But I didn’t want to stop and get out my iPhone in this slightly more isolated area, and above all I didn’t want to fixate on how I was going to capture it forever. Photos are precious, especially the longer time has passed from when you took them, but I also see so much value in living an un-digitally recorded life. I have a deep gut aversion to introducing technology (especially that which is designed to distract and cleave attention) into those moments out in nature when I feel most at one with the divine. I’ve also been strongly affected by a New York Times article I once read that confirmed my intuition, that there’s something very unnatural about our newly-programmed reflex to document everything. The article talked about how taking photos, particularly with digital cameras and phones (where you snap a thousand photos of the same thing, of everything, because you can) actually affects how your picture’s subject is woven into your memory. Your brain processes the moment as information that has been offloaded externally, and so it doesn’t retain it itself—i.e., by focusing on how you frame your shot, you lose the ability to remember what you’re seeing in the frame. At the same time, mass photo-taking disrupts the mind’s natural and necessary process of forgetting: giving importance to and burnishing some moments, which become long-term memory, while letting others be lost. I also think about the Japanese idea of “mono no aware,” which is that essential emotion we feel at our awareness of the impermanence of all things. Better to let ourselves ache and exult at that than reach for our iPhones.

Every day I am so grateful to be here.