Time...
one morning we were sitting looking out at the bay while eating breakfast. i said something like "time just didn't care about me". hol said it sounded like the first line in a book. so we agreed to each write about 750 words with that, or something quite like it as the first line - no rewrites - just "stream of consciousness".. hers isn't done yet, but it sure starts out cool. dream-like, naturally enough. here's mine:
“time” forgot to take me into consideration. me and everyone and everything else. it just plodded along in dead certainty of itself, oblivious to the matters of the mortals that came and went with its passing. “place” had been kind. i was born into the richest and most secure of all nations. i never knew hunger, or thirst, or uncertainty of my resting place. i never questioned my right to this security. it just was in this place. and so this place made me weak. time unwittingly conspired to make me weaker still. the parents of my generation had suffered through depression and world war – often and for sustained periods uncertain of their continued existence. once having survived, they applied themselves to providing the security and comfort that had been denied them. having been tempered by poverty and war they had great strength and subsequently succeeded easily. my generation was born to comfort and ease and security. it guaranteed our weakness.
on the surface, i felt everything was fine. underneath i knew everything was all wrong. i had not earned this largesse. i knew i was weak and untested. something in my soul craved the kind of challenge and tempering that had made greatness so common in the generation before. as a young person my feelings of self-loathing and unworthiness were not defined. i could not have told you why i tilted with death with drugs or fast cars – silly adversaries, self-inflicted. as my dissatisfaction grew, i tackled new challenges: religious discipline and self-denial. again i realized that these climbs led to peaks that held no view or conditioning that i craved. work was an interesting distraction, but seemed only to serve me as the wheel serves the hamster. blessed or cursed with a more perceptive sensibility than my small furry brother, i too-quickly recognized the nature of the circle. the climb to professional “success” consisted of too many false summits, populated by stores that sold climbing gear to the terminally stupid, or the hopelessly self-deceiving optimists who thought that one more peak might just be “the one”.
now time unerringly and uncaringly prepares the final lesson. the ache in my back and the encroaching stiffness in my joints and the certainty of my own mortality provide the only truly great challenge i will ever face. my children, like so many others, will be my greatest work. i am not ignorant of the irony of that statement. it is not fair nor noble to claim that the greatest accomplishment of my life in trying to determine the nature of existence was to assure that others would be burdened with the same problem. it is a certainty that my children taught me patience and endurance – as their children will assuredly teach them. these acquired attributes are really only the natural consequences of a rational person’s contests with time when they are evaluated minus the emotion. so my children, my most enduring work, represent another cycle; too beautiful and diverse to be immediately recognized as such, they are elegant rungs in a very large and slow wheel. one that accelerates with each passing moment. the child lives from minute to minute; the adult from week to week, the elder from season to season. time may be consistent, but our perception is certainly relative.
i bring my greatest effort to a contest i must surely lose. i struggle to bring meaning to as many minutes and hours as possible, even recognizing that leisure is a valuable waste, if such an oxymoron can be held true. i will work to retain what flexibility and strength my mind and body can hold. one day the ever-accelerating turning of the wheel beneath my feet will become so fast that i will wheel myself into some other place and time, if those measurable entities still have meaning. to those still in that other place the wheel will appear to have stopped. there is nothing i will be able to do about that – to comfort them or to say, “hey! i get it!” each of us will come to that place or that time, or that absence of both, in the same way as billions before and billions after. perhaps we will feel, if we still feel, that we have had the last laugh on time after all.