The Natural Pace of Things

I've spent a lot of time thinking about pace recently.

My mind is wound to live life at a purposeful tempo. Or, to put it another way, I move through most of life with a destination in mind. Once I arrive (and I've been fortunate enough to be able to arrive at many of my destinations, both tangible and intangible), it's not long before a new destination and a new path is chosen. There's often not much time spent in between. Some would call this type of behavior "Type A," others "neurotic," or perhaps even "results-driven." Perhaps that's why I like the process of travel and transportation so much; when I'm en route to a destination, there's an empty space created where I don't feel immediately responsible for setting a new path. It creates a tangible sense of relief.

I don't think that this is necessarily a perfect way to live life. That's not to say that there are certain advantages; I'm able (and almost obligated) to multitask. I plan ahead--sometimes to an uncomfortable degree. I walk at a relatively quick pace. But all of this decision making keeps my mind spinning at times. I get impatient when things don't happen quickly. I've never been someone who can fall asleep easily--I usually take 45 minutes or more to get from lights-out to sleep. And if I'm ever stuck in a place with no destination in mind, I get antsy.

I think part of this is just my personality, forming a Mobius loop between defining me and shaping who I am. But I'm sure my background as an East Coast college student has something to do with it as well, needing to jump from commitment to commitment seamlessly along with the rest of my peers, and with no dip in performance along the way. In my case, the rhythm of the city acts as a metronome, a hi-hat tapping in the background at 150 bpm to make sure you don't stray from the beat.

The reason that I'm waxing philosophic about this is that New Zealand, as well as (I'm sure) many countries that I've yet to visit, is at times incompatible with this pace of life. Things simply don't happen as quickly in the New Zealand countryside. It's been interesting to see how my mind, devoid of its usual ocean of stimuli, handles adapting to a few hours in a place like Thames.

Thames is a small town of 7,000 at the base of the Coromandel peninsula, two hours east of Auckland. It was a gold rush town originally, and at one time was the second largest city in New Zealand. As the gold dried up, people started to move to Auckland and elsewhere, leaving Thames as a quiet reminder of what it used to be. One guidebook I looked at described it as "small, and rather dull."

To be honest, planning for this trip was a perfect example of what can go wrong when moving at a fast pace. I had booked the tickets a few weeks ago--I found $1 seats round trip, and snatched them up without doing much research into where I was going. But the day before I left, I started to panic. I had scheduled six hours in Thames...was that too many? It was forecast to rain...what was I going to do with myself?

I spent hours on Saturday making backup plans and new itineraries. Maybe I could bus up to Coromandel Town and take a ferry back to Auckland. But the marine forecast called for rough seas...what if the ferry was cancelled and I was stuck in Coromandel Town overnight? I'd miss a critical lecture on spreadsheet-assisted constrained optimization problems, directly related to a problem set I was having trouble with! Or I could buy a bus ticket leaving Thames at 1:20 PM instead of 3:35 PM, but that was expensive. I had even created an itinerary going through Hamilton, turning the day into a six-hour, three-bus tour of central New Zealand.

It seems ridiculous when I write it out like that, but these were really the thoughts running through my head as rain poured down on Saturday afternoon. All I could concentrate on were those four words: "small, and rather dull." To put it plainly, I was reacting to the possibility of being trapped with no destination--nothing to do. As I look back on it now, it's clear that it was a reaction of fear.

As these things always turn out, I had nothing to fear. After three hours of tossing and turning before I got to sleep, I woke up at 6:30 AM to catch my 7:30 bus. The notoriously inaccurate NZ weather forecasts ("showers, some heavy at times") translated to a partially cloudy day with no rain. I had booked a few of the contingency plan routes, but I decided to just stick with my original plan.

The nearly empty bus snaked its way through awesome vistas for two hours before arriving in Thames. At 9:30 AM on a Sunday, the town was still sleepy. Most of the attractions and shops on the main street were closed for the day; even the i-Site wasn't open until noon. I headed to one place that I had researched and knew was open: a vegetarian cafe (what are the odds?) near the end of the two-kilometer-long Pollen Street. I ordered some breakfast and a hot chocolate, and read my Haruki Murakami book for a little while.

There's something about coastal towns that permits me to slow my pace a little (although I guess Auckland is a coastal city too). Maybe it's because the rhythm of the waves and the calls of the gulls--the metronome of the sea, so to speak--operates at a slower tempo than the city. I wandered around town for a while, heading for no place in particular. I decided to see a movie at the Thames Multiplex (three screens). The power went out for a few minutes during the movie because some car had hit a power pole, leaving me alone in darkness in the empty theater before the projectionist ran in to apologize. I went back to the cafe for lunch, and had a nice sandwich with kumara and some other veggies in it, with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Thames itself is sandwiched in between sea and mountains. On one side, verdant peaks separate the peninsula in half lengthwise. On the other, the Firth of Thames and its murky brown coast separate the Coromandel from Auckland. There's a walkway down the coast, appropriately named the Thames Coastal Walkway, that winds its way from a boat landing, behind a shopping center and a Pak `N Save, and past a small-gauge railroad track to a residential area about 4 km away.

It was an awesome walk. The skies were blue above me, but rain in the distance covered the rest of the peninsula in a gray cloak. There were heaps of great vantage points of the Firth--not to mention that turning around at any given time would give you a mountain vista. This was the kind of town that I could imagine living if I was a writer or an artist. Here are views from two ends of the same street:

Mountains looking one way.

Sea looking opposite. Who wouldn't want to live here?

Before I knew it, six hours had passed. The bus I had taken to Thames had already made it to Tauranga and back, and the same driver greeted me on the way back to Auckland.

Thames presented one of those moments that reminds you why you [and by you, I really mean me] need to travel. While I'm probably never going to permanently change the pace at which I live my day-to-day life (as even my relaxing day in Thames was the result of a bunch of planning), this trip truly felt like a one-day mental departure from my current reality. There were no partial differentiation problems floating in the Firth of Thames, nor essays to write on social class or exercises in set theory. Just the sea, the gulls, and a boardwalk that had collapsed decades ago and floated into the sea.