I was in Death Valley the other day, the desert valley located near the border of California and Nevada, scouting for best view points. I found a place, the bad water basin – the lowest point of North America. The immediate thought that popped into my mind – I must find the perfect spot where there aren’t much people who would photobomb my selfie and then click a perfect picture of myself or of the place that I can facebook, tweet or instagram. We usually run around looking for the right frame, right angle, right lighting etc. We end up spending most of our time getting a view of the places through the lens than through naked eyes. Well, if you are a photo enthusiast (which I’m not) you might be proud and happy of it, so that is perfectly alright. In addition to spending time on that I decided to do something else too. Actually this is something I used to do earlier, the good old times a phone meant the thing that stayed in home and a photograph is something which would take a couple weeks for you to actually see what you clicked and it would be of a significant cost too.

It was around six in the evening, that sweet zone of twilight. I have a two hour drive to Las Vegas from here. Drove the car to a little elevated place overlooking the valley with not much people, parked it by the shoulder, turned the ignition off, left my tablet, camera and phone in the car and just sat on the hood of the car. I was staring deep into the wet valley which is significantly below sea level, hidden from the rest of the world by the mountains seemingly possessive of their valley towering miles above sea level and the post-rain hazy white clouds which seemed to have breached the protective mountains and moving on slowly after a short passionate love making with the valley which is otherwise one of the driest places on the Earth.

I was sitting there for about thirty minutes, staring into the oblivion, trying hard not to think much about anything else in specific, so I can be in the moment to reach a point of stillness of mind and let the grandness of the schema sink in. It was a calm, blissful, endearing and humbling experience. I should do it more often.