It took thirty minutes, headed due west on Bolivia’s Route 1, to reach the first sighting of Lake Titicaca’s southern edge.

The largest lake in South America, Titicaca was known as the highest navigable lake in the world and appeared in the distance more like a small ocean.  Nestled amongst the famed Andes Mountains, its rich deep blue water sparkled brilliantly under a calm blue sky stretching nearly to the horizon.  The lake was so large that it took almost two hours to pass along its western edge, leaving those in the car silent most of the time, with Angela staring through her side window taking in the magnificence of it all.

So many places of simple and exquisite beauty. Such an extraordinary planet, she thought to herself.  It was something she’d known for years but had never truly appreciated until now.  This world was gradually feeling more superficial than exceptional, with billions of people arguing over places and things that, frankly, would be here thousands of years after everyone was gone.

She thought about how short a human lifespan was on a planet like this.  In a universe like this.  Seventy or eighty years against millions or even billions, making the span of a human life little more than a speck—at best, a momentary flash in time compared to things like a lake or an ocean, whose waves and ripples felt timeless, ambivalent of what floated on or within them.  It reminded Angela of the old saying that an ocean had no memory.

In reality, the only true sense of time was born through human consciousness, with human lives being just a momentary flash within it.  So brief and so temporary, yet humans spent so much of their flash doing what?  Arguing and fighting.  Only to have their entire existence snuffed out seventy or eighty years later.  Sometimes sooner, sometimes later.

Everything they felt.  Everything they thought about or loved.  Gone into the ether.

It made Angela stop and ponder.

Just how much of our lives did the average person spend in some form of confrontation with something or someone over what they thought was right either mentally or emotionally?

And most of it, she knew, being an anthropologist, were the same arguments.  The same worries and bickering that thousands of generations had before us.  The same fears.  The same controversies.  The same disagreements.  In many cases humans had fought over the very same resources.

A perpetual argument.  An endless cycle running repeatedly in a world that had not and would not change unless something interrupted the pattern.  Something so meaningful and profound that it would make every person stop and reassess what the world meant to them and what life meant to them.  To make them remember that our individual flashes in time were precious, never to repeat.  Never to remember what we had done or learned even between the bickering.