Written by Well, technically it is.
But this spoon is also a time machine.
The spoon came to me during an intense self-sufficient hike . Nothing crazy like others do. But for me 10 days in the backcountry of Stewart Island, carrying all my food through deep mud, stream crossings and up and down rooted creeks, were wild.
I packed everything rigorously, food and shelter, safety stuff, and gear. After a challenging day and long awaited dinner, I realized that I didn’t pack a fork or spoon. Granted, I would’ve been fine without. But at that moment, I was devastated in a cold shelter and too exhausted to sleep on that windy night where the rain kept slashing against the walls.
And then I found this spoon the next day outside. Sometimes it felt as if the spoon carried me along the remaining length of the trail, meal by meal.
The spoon is hard plastic and definitely not better than the titanium spork I forgot in the hostel. Yet, it has been with me for the last 6 years. Always in my back pack.
Is it weird holding onto something so simple so dearly?
Small things can carry a touch, a smell, a sound, that transports us right back to a place and time and past self.
The curr-curr of pigeons in the morning takes me back to the small vacation house in Italy where we went yearly since I was born.
The smell of fresh water sprayed on flowers while passing a flower shop gets me straight to Tokyo where I had my first all-alone-away-from-home experience. In the business complex was a flower shop where I spent many lunch and coffee breaks chatting with the two women.
And now holding this spoon.
It’s not just the taking back in time what these items do. It’s as if the past experience merges in that moment with your present self, and the future wavering along to join the little instant. It creates a pause in the doing and offers a crazy mix of everything that is you – then, now and coming.
“Time is not a river, time is a lake where the past, present, and future are always there at the same time,” someone said to me a while ago.
This spoon does that.
It’s not a surprise I have it with me in the hospital right now. And used it already on day 1.