Caving: Vietnam
In June of 2017 I was privileged enough to participate in a 10-person expedition into Son Doong, the world’s largest known cave. Discovered in 1990 but not fully explored until 2009, the cave is hidden in the lush inhospitable jungles of central Vietnam close to the border of Laos.
The expedition was challenging physically and psychologically-enduring the unrelenting heat and humidity while carrying 10-15kg of equipment on your back in pitch black conditions made for a demanding 5 days and 4 nights. But I would not have traded the experience for any other, and I came away from the cave contemplating heady thoughts about time, space, and creation.
While I’m no philosopher or scholar when it comes to pondering such heavy topics, I was recently asked on a Facebook thread (following a photo album I posted about the adventure) to comment on ‘how this experience shaped my new perspective about life.’ A further comment asked me to expound on how the experience may have changed my perspective about life, or whether it supported my existing perspective.
I am going to attempt to answer these difficult questions here, 4 days after returning from Vietnam. I have no intention of sounding self-important or grandiose, but I am flattered to be asked such questions and will attempt to honor them by answering as thoughtfully as I can.
How did this experience shape my new perspective about life?
I think the most significant ‘epiphany’ I had while inside the cave was the realization that time and space are completely relative, and infinite-not just in the cosmos but even here on earth. My own understanding of time and space (how many years is a long time? what is a huge space?) was completely upended inside Son Doong, from stepping over 400-million-year-old fossils (which preceded the 4-million-year-old cave by 395 million years) to grasping the enormity of the cavernous cathedral ceilings inside-which have famously been defined as being able to house the Empire State Building vertically and horizontally.
The entrance to Son Doong is hidden in the thick, leech-infested jungles of Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park. The opening to the cave is perhaps no wider than a typical two-car garage. As you descend into the darkness via harnesses and ropes, suspended against a wet, slippery vertical wall of melted-candle-wax-like stalactites, the darkness swallows you and you are struck by the seemingly infinite vastness that fades into the black beyond your eyesight. A rushing river rapid echoes faintly in the distance, drowned out by the yelled commands of the porters and guides and the clanging of clamps and cramp-ons against the rock as you make your way down into the bowels of the earth.
When you think of ‘huge,’ you think of an elephant. You think of Texas, maybe. But to see ‘huge’ in the flesh, inside this cave, is to realize that your concept of largeness is limited only by your conservative imagination. To stand inside one of Son Doong’s enormous caverns, or beneath a doline (skylight) with a beam of sunlight streaming down from the forest a mile above you, is to contemplate ‘huge’ in completely different terms.
As for my understanding and redefinition of ‘time,’ when you see the remnants of this cave’s birth dating back 4 million years, the traces and scars of giant boulders pushed through the cave’s canals, carving rough and jagged pathways and spaces to create the wonder in front of you-it is hard to deny that your grasp of time is truly limited to the insignificant decades to which we are comfortable defining the stages of our lives (youth, middle age, old age...death).
Even tiny, perfectly round cave pearls (spherical rocks which are formed when trapped under rushing water, tumbling for years on end until they emerge from a drought to be the marbles and golf-ball sized wonders you see in the cave today) take hundreds if not thousands of years to form. Several human generations of ‘time’ to create a stone the size of a marble.
My realization that ‘space’ and ‘time’ are so relative (and, in my own previously defined terms, so insignificant) was truly humbling and a bit poignant, to say the least. I think I’ll wrestle with this notion for a long time.
Did this experience change my perspective about life? Or support my existing perspective?
I think being in the cave did both. As I tried to explain above, it changed my perspective about life by making me realize the insignificance of me in relation to the wonder before me. While my life is important to me and my loved ones, in the grand scheme of the earth and the formation of this cave hundreds of thousands of generations ago, I am really nothing. This is not an upsetting realization, it’s a humbling one. You can be your own universe, but never forget that outside of that to the rest of the world, to the rest of the earth, you are pretty insignificant in the space you occupy and what you leave in your wake.
That said, the cave experience also supported my existing perspective about life. As I’ve reached middle age, I’ve come to the understanding that time waits for no one, and goes by so fast. I can still recall being a child on my first day of kindergarten, and yet my life is probably more than half over. It’s a crisis I grapple with daily, wondering what else might be passing me by, what am I missing, why is it all moving along so fast? I don't want it to end!
This is more than “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out”) or “YOLO” (”You Only Live Once”), these are bothersome questions I struggle with as I lie awake with insomnia wondering how many more years I’ll have to discover wonder in the world. While that world is infinite, my time on it is not-as the cave harshly pointed out to me, my time here is insignificant in the ‘big picture’ of things.
So how can I make that time count?
I have always been curious about the world and those places foreign to me; it’s one of the reasons I’m an avid diver-I am able to escape the mundane ‘dry land’ of my office and home in Los Angeles, and in minutes immerse myself in an infinite ocean where I’m the impostor and the visitor, a stranger in a strange land. It’s that element of alienness and discovery that excites me, of being submerged in a ‘drowned world’ less travelled than the one above. It’s isolating, yet crowded with other creatures unfamiliar to me. And it’s always exciting to be in a world otherwise forbidden (lack of oxygen makes it a rarified place for us humans; we can only visit, and but for short bursts at a time).
This is the same sensation I felt inside the cave; I marveled at this place on earth that until recently lay hidden in a jungle, undiscovered. A farmer stumbled upon it and suddenly this dreamland became a reality, and accessible to those fortunate enough to withstand the challenges and demands of entering. How many more places like this exist on the planet? One? An infinite amount? We may never discover them all. And I certainly won’t live to explore them all.
So to be able to witness this incredible, description-defying place and stand within it’s cavernous spaces was truly a privilege, and one that inspires me to keep exploring, to keep making the most of each day, to keep living my life with the knowledge and understanding that it’s finite, and insignificant, and ephemeral in the big picture.
To me, however, my life is anything but insignificant and ephemeral...it's up to me to create possibilities that are infinite...discoveries that are significant...and lasting impressions that will enrich and fulfill me for the (blink-and-you’ll-miss-them) years to come.
I came home from the cave inspired, renewed, and excited about everything life and our planet have to offer, as if I had pressed the ‘enhance’ button on the Photoshop of life itself.
I’m going to continue striving to press the “enhance” button in my life, every day. Everything looks so much better in full color!