Time is a Strange and Slippery Thing

My thoughts, for today, are on the nuances of time.

It's really a strange thing, when you think about it in the right perspective. And often times, it's a depressing perspective, a realization that begins to happen as childhood and the teenage years start falling further and further behind, and suddenly, you're no longer faced with all the potential of what you could be, but the reality of what you are, or will very soon become.

We have a finite number of breaths to take. It may be a variable number, certainly, longer for some than for others and a number that we ourselves can change (you could burn through a few extra breaths by hyperventilating right now, if that's your fancy) but no matter how much variation we have over the number of breaths we will take during our lifetime, it's still a finite number. There's no way to make it into that little sideways 8 symbol that represents the infinite.

We spend a lot of our time worrying or doing things that are largely trivial, and yet, there's nothing wrong with that, because for most people, myself included, a well lived life is just as good, or maybe even better, than an important life. Because important people might be remembered, might have their names recorded for all time, but they're not really people at that stage, are they? George Washington, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo... they're concepts to us, ideas conveyed by the legacies that they left in their place, but the whole of their humanity is lost to the grave, their very essences distilled down to the facts about what they did in life. Is that a form of immortality worth pursuing?

At least with a well-lived life, even if you spend it doing things that matter to no one but yourself, you can have the satisfaction of the experience, of knowing that you may die unknown, but that you had a good run in the process. You had some good times, and that's something. It might not be much, but it could be enough.

I don't know the names of all of my great-grandparents. And you know something weird? My grandmother (who is still alive!) is actually a great-great-grandmother (not to me, it's my brother's daughter's child). I don't know the names of -any- of my great-great-grandparents. And it's weird to think about the fact that, unless my lifespan is such that I'll be around to see the great-grandkids and the great-greats and so on, they won't know my name.

Human life is immersed in the immediacy of the moment. It's what we are and we lose ourselves when we go outside of that fact.