Last weekend I took a break from practicing spontaneity to spontaneously stop at a park off a highway in Burnaby. Spontaneity is something I’m bad at, so I was deliberately practicing it by blowing off my work and going for a drive. I kept catching these tantalizing glimpses of the strait through the trees and I told myself if I saw a sign for a park or a pulloff or something I would take it. Which is how I found myself not ten minutes later crossing a narrow footbridge over a set of  railroad tracks.

It turns out the tracks were important, because the park is one of the last places to bear the name of the town that grew up around them. The railroad, the water, and the plentiful trees created the perfect habitat for a sawmill, called Barnet after the owner’s wife’s family. The community took it’s name from the mill and grew into a sizable company town, with economic ups and downs, fires and rebuildings, and even a dramatic labor strike. But today nothing remains except the park and Highway 7A, still signed in some places as the Barnet Highway.

The experience helped me put things in perspective, though I wasn’t quite sure what that perspective was. Striking for fair pay must have seemed all-important to those long-ago mill workers, yet now it was barely a footnote in history. How would my looming, all-important, panic-inducing deadlines look in five years, yet alone a hundred and fifty? That kind of thinking certainly made all my fears and dreams seem fleeting and insignificant. But perhaps history is not an appropriate scale by which to measure a single person’s life. Humanity may experience centuries, but humans experience moments. And the moment I was experiencing was of a mild winter morning by the water with the snowy hills heaped up like clouds and someone’s dog running by on the path. It was altogether a much nicer moment than any I might have been experiencing at home behind my desk. So I decided my deadlines weren’t, in the grand scheme of things, all that important, and I should go on practicing spontaneity a little while longer.