Time Is A Funny Thing
" It is almost impossible for us whose time on Earth is limited to a few breezy decades to appreciate how remote in time from us the Cambrian outburst was. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. It was, in other words, an extremely long time ago and the world was a very different place."
BILL BRYSON, A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING.
Time is a funny thing. Some physicists argue if time even exists. To the scientist, it is just a measurement of the earth’s rotation, or the measurement of the speed of light and the energy that forms matter in our existence, or time is just how fast sound moves through the space we occupy, and to us mere mortals who leave it to others to define, we know it exists because it steals our lives from our physical bodies as our components within us lose their vitality in the aging process. To some, that is all the time there is. But we all know time is more than all the various formal and scientific definitions, and it is more than the measurement of our failing bodies. Time allowed us to be who we were, and it allowed us life, and love and tears, and yes even death. Time has taken many people away from us, and it has our number, we all know that, and time has left us with a reality existing only in our mind’s eye, and a truth in our hearts and that truth tells us among many other things that the best of times is what we should remember.
Memories of the best of times lets us escape from the sad and the imperfect in our lives and the hurts that binds us to unhappiness until we learn how not to be a victim. Oh, that tricky state comes and goes like a repeated dream, but the freedom gained from the escape of the victim mentality is bliss, and bliss has a beginning, and the beginning was in the youth of our years when our discoveries were all new and our souls tingled with the excitement of what and who in our lives was coming next, the first times. How many instances have you started a sentence with the words, “ I will never forget the first time I…..? Those first times, the good times are what stays with us when all other times are crowded out with old age and with the dying of cells within the failing neuro-electrical and chemical firings of our aging brains and bodies. Time seemingly does not and cannot eradicate the best memories of our first times. I believe that because I believe those memories live on and make up our souls and they go with us beyond our physical state because those memories construct our souls into what they will be for eternity. Surely it is so.
In the 50’s and in Odessa, Texas, I believe I lived in a time and a place that was special because there were so many people with so much vitality in an area that was alive and new and we reflected that vitality in a carefree few years that was unique in time in that it was peaceful and prosperous and all things were possible. I can’t say it any better than that. I have traveled my country, and I have traveled my world and I have friends that are new and I have friends from my earliest days, and I can say there is no fun like the fun we had when all things were coming to us for the first time. I believe emphatically that my perception was real that nearly everyone I met in that period and place was just hyped because of the times they were in and the opportunities they saw. It was not perfect, we knew it then and we know it now, but all in all it was so hard to beat for a life experience.
Frankly, until this day, I will tell anyone that I have never met as many friendly and fun people as I met while growing up in that area. There were so many good and caring people. There were so many intriguing people. There were so many entrepreneurial people. There were wild successes and bigger than life existences, and there was grace and so many beautiful girls to ogle, and so many of them were so classy. And there were so many suave and sophisticated and mature people for their age people, and there were gifted people and all of them were exciting in their own way. It was so good to be alive and there in that time. I admit there were those who would give someone a knuckle sandwich just for the heck of it too! But even they were exciting to know. And for those who did not experience it that way, I pity that fact for them. I too saw some pretty tough times and they are not forgotten but those times are by far over-shadowed by the excitement of the good and first times. I thank those people even though I no longer remember their names and so many of the details, but I have that feeling inside me that makes me grin when I think of growing up with them and in that town and in that environment, and again, in that beautiful time.
If there is a poetic justice in this magnificent creation and if my perception of the after life is anywhere near correct, then our soulful selves will be able to experience anything it can imagine in the afterlife. When my turn comes, I want the out of body experience in which I can revisit any time period, at any place, and with whomever I want, and see the past right in front of me as it happened and since imagination is the only limit, I will have the privilege of stepping inside my young body as it once was in the reliving of any chosen moment and then once again relive the moment. If there is justice, poetic justice, then I can re-experience it all. I’ll feel it all, sense it all, and know for eternity the moments of bliss that were so treasured by us all and after I re-experience it, I will thank my creator in gratitude and turn loose of it all until it beckons me again. Hey, if it can be imagined, it is possible. That is what I want to believe.
Michael Lewis Moore