What if time doesn't really exist, and the only way to see that is to let go of it?
In this episode of Meander & Muse, I sit down with Max McCormick, an old friend whose path I've crossed in various parts of the world, and one of the most quietly adventurous people I know.
Max grew up in Australia, studied to be an engineer, worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and eventually traded a life of deadlines for a life of following his curiosity.
We wander into the untouched rainforests of Borneo - flying in on missionary planes, trekking village to village with indigenous guides, making up maps on the fly and learning the hard way that river shoes full of holes are an open invitation to leeches. We talk about the strange freedom of being somewhere so remote that no one in the world knows where you are.
But underneath the adventures, this is a conversation about time.
Max describes how years of head-down engineering compressed his sense of time until "weeks went by like seconds" and how travel cracked that open. Waiting for buses he couldn't rush, surrendering to journeys that took as long as they took, he slowly stopped gripping the clock.
Time, he found, would "just open up." And in the places where he was most fully present, it seemed to disappear altogether - the dimension of time simply falling away from his perception of reality.
His conclusion is that time isn't the fixed thing we treat it as, and the only way to understand that is to let go and surrender to the moment. Once you do, he says, "amazingly good things start to happen."
Along the way, we talk about the creativity born from boredom, the Henry Miller line he lives by - "Every day we slaughter our finest impulses" - and why, if you're curious about something, you should simply follow it.
If you love conversations about travel, presence, and the deeper questions underneath both, I think you'll really sink into this one.
To learn more about Borneo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borneo
