I think about time a lot. How time is perpetually moving, never stopping. And how our lives keep going because time keeps going, even when it feels like we want it all to just slow down
or even pause,
just so we can catch our breath.
And perhaps time’s most enigmatic, ethereal revelation is recognizing time past, life past, bewildered where it all went
and how we are so changed from life then, and life now.
I’m certain we all experience a golden nostalgia for life long ago, we perceive it to be simpler, less painful. Perhaps it is the romantic quality of the dated film or photograph; but most likely it is our memory so selective, emitting the mundane and the unpleasant, reminiscing mostly the good.
And sadness is created as we watch a life in its early stages, in blissful hurdle over sprinkler heads, grazing in dandelion summers …unaware of life’s imminent misfortunes waiting ahead.
Returning to the county I was raised in, causes me to frequently bump into individuals that were part of my life before marriage and kids: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, etc. And it catches me unaware. Like my two worlds are succumbing to a brazen collision, a crash of life then and life now.
Somehow, somewhere I have created a canyon. A chasm in time separating my life, even my being, into compartments of existence. But this isn't reality. We are, in reality, a composite entity of every experience, every encounter, every relation.
“Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. ”
Einstein, the man who saw time as relative, rather than time absolute, said, "the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." Timelessness allows us to sojourn beyond parts, phases, stages and into an ensemble of life experience.
As adults who once in youth, frolicked in that freedom of summer light, that past felicity and respite will never be long lost. It remains constantly within; it is ours to carry and sustain through eventual winters ahead.
And we may now have to hurdle obstacles far more daunting than sprinkler heads as time keeps moving; but I'm certain that when we look back at the now, we will remember the good and emit a lot of the unpleasant, just as we did before. And we will recognize how we have bloomed throughout it all.
As we connect the dots, seeing the continuity of ourselves and of our fellow travelers through time, we will apprehend the totality and the grandeur subsisting in every individual life. And no more sadness will arise from remembering what once was, because we will comprehend each life in gratitude and in genuineness: a life consummate in whole, unfragmented and eternal.