Secmol

I don't remember what I've mentioned about Secmol already, but I'm in love with the place and I want to talk about it now. Secmol is the place I spend half my time in Ladakh, and the place that feels most like home out here in the land of high passes. They say each year should feel shorter since each becomes a smaller fraction of the total time one has lived, but age 27 has without a doubt seemed longer than any other year in my life. I suppose in one sense it feels like a long year in the same way that we might call a particularly busy day a “long day”, but in anoter sense the place gives me the strange feeling that time is actually stretched out, that somehow I am not aging as fast. There is something about this particular stretch of the Indus valley that gives me the blissful feeling that I have time to do the things I want to in life, and at my own pace.

I need to explain another feeling, that I wasn’t quite able to place last spring, but which seems to be more clear this time around. It usually strikes me when I’m outside brushing my teeth or washing up before bed in some village or at Secmol. I look across a valley at the imposing outline of a mountain, sometimes iced by the moon’s reflection, and get a strange feeling which I’ve come to think of as “missing something that is right in front of me.” It was a difficult emotion to place, let alone to describe, but when I explained it to other members of my group, they enthusiastically related to the feeling. One student pointed out articulately that it could be the anticipation of missing something, and I think there is some reality to this. Impermanence is an important concept to understand in the Buddhist tradition, and one that can bring about a quiet sadness, but when it is understood that nothing lasts, including ourselves, the idea of impermanence can be comforting as we come to realize that we are all connected in this way, that we are never alone. Immortality, while perhaps dreamt about by everyone at some point in life, would certainly be a lonely fate, as we would watch everything else change or perish. Taking in the beauty here, it is not just the sense that I cannot stay in Ladakh that quiets me, but also the knowledge that my group, students in their late teens, are experiencing the same thing from a frame of mind that is in my past. It’s as if an illusory Ladakh of my teenage years is gone and missed.

In Ladakh and particularly at Secmol, to bring the idea back home, all of my younger years come back to me. I am young in age as it is, but I simply feel younger. The place makes it easy to be healthy and time slows to a crawl, and I know this because I have been unhealthy and watched precious time slip away. The air is clean, the work fulfilling and the energy positive. I can embody the youth that surrounds me. Surely this could be perceived as an unhealthy way of thinking--dwelling on years passed. But there is also the realization, in the Buddhist tradition, that we all carry with us everything we have ever been. It is in this way that I am still a child or a teenager. It is in the same sense that my time at Secmol has already passed, that I am an older version of me, who has lived to enjoy and come to miss this place. Like Siddartha’s river, we are like water, always at our source, our rapids and in the oceans we empty into.

There is work to be done here, but it’s fulfilling work, because the ends are visible and often immediate yet perpetually rewarding, and it’s relaxing and happy work done along side smiling faces. No one complains about their responsibilities because they are rotated between the students here. One might be the campus coordinator one month, sweep floors the next, and then switch to maintaining the solar panels and batteries. There is stimulation here when you want, and a peaceful grove of trees or a walk by the river when you want to relax. For me the place is like James Hilton's Lost Horizon, where a newcomer finds that no one ages quite like they would in the outside world. But while in that tale, age quickly catches up with those who leave Shangri-La, I do not plan to let this happen. I will carry with me the emotions I have come to realize here. I look forward to this Thanksgiving, home with the family on a crisp fall night, at which point all of these feelings will be sinking in deeper and taking on still new meaning. I look forward to returning to Ladakh in the spring of next year, and the return from traveling sometime next summer. But for now, the high passes of the present, and the music of Secmol calls. Ju-le.