Time and Shit

July 19, 2026

Time is a funny thing. While holed up in La Union waiting to feel better, Carlos and I decided to go through some of our digital spaces and clean up. I discovered that my messages were taking up almost 50 GB of space on my iCloud account, so I decided to take the messages to the chopping block. So many old memories, some conversations incredibly difficult to get rid of, like old text conversations between my dad and I. I combed through those chats and took some screenshots, wanting to hang on to every word that wasn’t about taxes and money. But who knows if I’ll ever go back and look on those screenshots. When I think about my memories of Dad, these text messages are such a tiny blip, such a small representation of who he was. I deleted the messages and cried for the umpteenth time today.

I woke up this morning feeling good, but with gurgling intestines, still recovering from the diarrhea that afflicted me all the way up the Cordillera Blanca. Carlos and I had planned to continue our ride today, after taking a day off in La Union yesterday. We woke up at 6am, began packing the bikes, and I began running back and forth from the bathroom. At 7am, I sat on our hotel bed and closed my eyes, really trying to tune into what my body was asking for. My mind really wanted to continue the ride. We have been trying to fight off the bad motto “three months is not enough time” and being stuck in a small town with nothing to do except visit the toilet doesn’t help either of us feel like we’re making the most of our time. We’ve been in Peru for almost three weeks and have done only three days on the Peru Great Divide. So when it became clear that I wanted another day to rest and recover, but that I was too afraid to say the disappointing thing, I plucked up the courage to tell Carlos I wasn’t going to ride my bike today and cried again.

Oh, Time. Cruel, kind, relentless, patient, forever, too short. I named my bike Kali, many years ago, after the Hindu goddess of death, time, and change. There was something about the black body of my bike and her endlessly turning wheels that spoke to me as Kali, the devouring mother. I bought my bike about a year and half before my dad died, and when I began to ride my bike again in the throes of grief, the turning wheels sometimes felt like torture and sometimes felt like relief.

This bad motto “there’s not enough time” has been stuck with me for a long time. Last year when I was still working, this motto was something I firmly believed in. I thought leaving my job and having my days to myself would banish the bad motto. I would finally have enough time. Except that wasn’t true. I definitely had more time, but still not enough. The days went by faster and slower, and my to-do list kept growing, and to this day I still have no idea how anyone gets anything done. I thought six months of extended travel, three months in South America, three months in Southeast Asia would be enough, and here we are, three weeks in Peru, sometimes feeling like it isn’t enough.

In the months following my dad’s death I wondered if I had enough time with him. Of course I didn’t. I felt like the rest of my life with him had been stolen. But I soon understood that this was a dangerous idea. If I chose to believe that I didn’t have enough time with my dad, then every moment I had with him becomes a pass/fail test in which I either made the most of my time with him or I didn’t. That is no way to hold my memories of my dad. Over many years I have come to the conclusion that the time I had with my dad was enough, because my relationship with my dad is beyond time.

This is something I spoke to my priest, Fr. John, about once. I told him that time was slipping through my fingers like sand, and that I was desperate for more. Fr. John said something that I will never forget, that when you experience union with the Divine, time takes on another quality entirely. Time becomes endless.

And time truly is endless on the Peru Great Divide. Space is endless, too. Carlos and I left Huaraz on July 15th to begin riding over the Cordillera Blanca, 10,000 feet of elevation gain at over 10,000 feet of elevation. We rode from Huaraz into Huascarán National Park and camped the first night at about 4200 m (13,700 ft). The next day we climbed some of the highest passes of the entire Peru Great Divide, at 4800 m (15,700 ft). But when I woke up that morning I discovered I had once again contracted diarrhea, and we started riding our big day at 9am, much later than we would have liked. I wondered if we would have enough time to clear not one, but two 4800 m passes and get ourselves settled for the night.

We were literally on top of the world, breathing thin air, and looking at the expanse of the Cordillera Blanca, not even understanding how we got there or what we were looking at. We’d never been up so high before in our lives. Plains gave way to huge mountain walls rising into the sky, and sometimes I had a hard time telling the glaciers from the clouds. In the mountains, you are always looking back in time, sometimes hundreds of millions of years into the past. We could see the history of the formation of the Andes written along the range, how the ground was cracked, split, smooshed, and turned on its side by movement of tectonic plates and volcanic activity in the Ring of Fire so long ago. Time and space so endless that the Andes are still rising.

And I shat my way all the way up those mountain passes. It was everything, from disgusting to divine. And it took a long time to get up there, and a long time to get down. That bad voice that says “it’s not enough time” was talking to me all day, but I had to silence it and keep pedaling. I had to trust that in good time we would get where we needed to go, even though we started late, even though I had diarrhea, and we did. We eventually settled into a strange but wonderful truck stop on the other side of the range at 4200 m where we were fed a hot dinner, tea, and given a warm bed to sleep in with seven wool blankets layered on top. The third day, we coasted down, down, down all the way to La Union to rest. It was like flying on a magic carpet, past mines and Chinese tunnels.

We had planned only one rest day in La Union, but now it’s turned into two. And that same anxious voice says “it’s not enough time”, but I have to remember that I had enough time to get up and down the mountain safely, all I had to do was keep pedaling. I have enough time. Some things go beyond.