When is a bridge not a bridge?

I was hiking in a state park near my home recently when I stumbled across a surprise wooden bridge along the trail. The landscape was hilly and filled with vernal pools, so I guess if I had paid a little more attention to my surroundings, I would have expected a little wooden bridge. In fact, I would have even perhaps expected more than the measly one I found. Fortunately, though, I try to not spend that level of analytical energy toward anything while hiking through the woods on a sunny day, so the uneven little wooden bridge I found brought a pleasant surprise. Truly,  any new scenery on a hike is something I appreciate for its uncanny ability to stir up my thoughts away from whatever they happened to be in the previous moment.

Now, as I walked across its length, around forty feet, like clockwork my thoughts were jostled to a new focal point - this little wooden bridge. To understand how I came to ridiculously admire this bridge, it needs to be understood that I live with what I understand to be a high amount of general nervous energy which I need to exert a ridiculous amount of mental effort to quell. This is not to say I suffer from generalized anxiety, but rather that I find it hard to clear my mind entirely of even utterly inconsequential thoughts - of which I have many - and even more so when I find myself in the exact situations I seek out to be meditative. If my mind is still electrified with a plethora of irrelevant thoughts despite being in a situation that I should find relaxing or calming, I try to focus only on my sensory experiences as I experience them. The idea behind doing this is that when focusing on the now I stop thinking so much about the everything else. I think some call this mindfulness, but I don’t want to be lumped in with all of that.

Anyway, as I was about halfway through my journey across the bridge when I realized my mind was still fixating not on my present but on various social engagements I had failed to keep up with. In order to quell this line of thinking that was frustratingly removing me from my surroundings I started to, as I do, focus on my surroundings and sensory experience. As I was trying to do this - which, I think using the word trying indicates that I’m not very good at it - I thought specifically about the many flat wooden boards that made up this very not-flat wooden bridge. “Focusing” on the boards made me then feel the pretentious necessity to form some profound, astute observation about them. While I still have yet to make a single profound observation in my life, in my mental exasperation all I could focus on was the fact that these flat boards - planks of wood - used to be alive. Not only did the planks of this bridge used to be alive, this thing made of wood felt kind of at home in the woods. In a certain way, I could even find it beautiful that these dead trees, after being cut down and maimed, had now been returned to the familiar dirt of the forest. Perhaps, even, they could have originally grown in the very forest they’ve been installed in as a bridge. Did they ever even leave?

In any event - they are now it. It is the bridge, and the once-living things that make it up now seem as lifeless as the iron nails used to keep everything together. Now, I had crossed the bridge, and a final thought came over me that resonated for hours, likely because of the strength of its utter pretentiousness. “That bridge used to be a living thing” I thought. Immediately after this, the part of my mind closer to the subconscious responded with “We all used to be a living thing, eventually”. I’d like to now thank my nigh-subconscious mind for the brilliant realization that we all die, and expect my nobel prize in the mail. 

Initially I hoped that nobody would make me into a bridge once I became an un-living thing. What a raw deal these trees got, that they were forced from their ground and then returned as a mangled image of their former selves. Among their former peers no less. How embarrassing. However, after exerting even a modicum of thought, I realized that over millennia of geological process I will totally and completely decompose to become “one” with the elements, the chemical and physical ingredients in my body mixing with the soil and rock, all of me just becoming earth.  If people are still making bridges by the time the matter in my body has been reduced to its raw elements and reincorporated into the earth, then that means people are still alive millions of years from now. This hopeful image of humanity living far beyond the apocalyptic present we seem to be stuck in is comforting. I hope I get made into a bridge. Just, like, in the very distant future.