In Awe of the Sea: An Andean-Inspired Contemplation of Distance and Dreaming.

Sometimes, a single special instant can open us into lifetimes of deep contemplation, reminding us of the way that humans can bridge connection across distances. This is one of these kinds of moments, transmitted into writing.

One sunny February morning, while skirting the boardwalk of Miraflores just beyond Porta Street, I found two girls who, leaning against the wall that protects pedestrians from falling off the cliff, watched the ocean that opened before their eyes: a blue-gray mantle whose immensity must have seemed impossible to them.

Presumably, the astonishment they were feeling was not gratuitous since their clothing revealed their Andean origins, a region where bodies of water, always Mediterranean, have known edges, which are surrounded by mountains, and thus small in size in comparison to the expansive ocean.

The contrast could not be greater since shortly before midday the heatwave was peaking, which is something that to them, loaded with bundles and dressed in sweater, skirt and wool stockings, seemed unimportant. I parked the car in a jiffy and got off promptly (situations like this one usually last for a few seconds), so I could take a picture with the cell phone from the opposite sidewalk. “What ideas would be going through their heads?”, I wondered not without envy. But more importantly, what feelings would pervade their spirit, and what would they feel when contemplating that impossible vastness, magnificent and dwarfing at the same time?

I watched the two girls in fascination since they faced, with Pascal, the amazement of the infinite, the experience of the immeasurable, of the incomprehensible, and also, the verification of one’s own limits and the inevitability of human smallness. Gray seagulls, tiny from afar, traced imaginary lines in the air, their squawks inaudible by the distance and by the noise of cars that, ceaseless, swift, irascible, ran between observer and observed. Multicolored kites crossed the sky in a trite miracle, the paraglide’s acolytes affirming already their daily quota of flying pride held by invisible threads. Old and young foreigners passed behind them talking in languages ​​that would be strange to them.

Nothing, however, took them out of their reverie. The scene must have taken less than a minute, too little given the wondrous nature of what I was witnessing, but the passing of cars—their echoes magnified by the concrete wall of the buildings overwhelming our backs—soon reminded me of urgent matters and had to move on, which I did with a mix of awe and sorrow.

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