Future present

Future present

Future present

I would suppose most people have had moments in their life which in some way, to a greater or lesser degree has influenced them on how they perceive reality.   Perhaps many of these moments or filed away, forgotten, none the less they are there.  Others stand out loud and clear, staying fresh over the years, never dimming; a moment that perhaps is often visited and thought about. Like most people I have had my share, a few stand out and still affect me on a deep level.  I think these moments build on each other, for if one where to draw a line between these encounters, I would think a pattern would surface, perhaps showing a certain theme, or maybe a number of sub themes that run through each of our lives.

I remember this incident as if it happened yesterday, though in reality it was 45 years ago. I was 13, just starting the 8th grade at Cristobal High School, in the Canal Zone.  Sometimes I would go to the library to read during the lunch hour.  It was a very good library and I always enjoyed my time there.  I would often take something off the shelf and read it, or if a magazine caught my attention, would browse through it looking for an article that would interest me.   On this particular day I spotted ‘Look” magazine on the rack, the new issue and began to read it.   Very soon I came upon a picture of a starlet, whose name I have since forgotten; very beautiful, blond, and elegant.   She was sitting on a chair, leaning to her left over the back and staring into the camera, dressed in a very sexy black dress.   So her being a starlet, it would be redundant to say she was beautiful, but I will say it any way…..she was gorgeous.  

She was being interviewed and I was taken by something she said.  Something that had been with me since I was very small, and while it did not bother me, it did cloud the way I looked at life and what it was all about.   Perhaps in some ways that where not always in my best interest, perhaps it was a mixed bag, the way most things are in this world. Of course I am speaking as a somewhat mature adult; at least I try to be, how successful, well I guess that is for others to judge.    In any case, during the interviewed they asked her about her life; her response was both interesting and chilling to me.   She said, “I am 26 years old, and I have a sense that life is slipping through my hands like sand, I can’t grasp it, it just slips through”.   I am not sure that is a correct quote, but it is close enough. 

Reading this brought back to mind a number of similar incidents in my life, where it was presented to me, the painful truth of the brevity of our lives.  Sand slipping through ones fingers, is a very apt metaphor of this reality.   I can’t say that reading this changed me in any drastic way. It just reaffirmed something that had haunted me up to that time, something that I really did not always want to contemplate; the reality on how temporary we all are.  I know that this is a very common theme in many people’s lives.  For some this can be consoling, for others something terrifying, something best not thought about.   Perhaps the majority are like me, both aspects present, each having an ascendancy over the other, first this and now that. That beautiful young woman would now be in her early 70’s, I wonder what kind of interview she would now give if she could be found, or if she is even still alive.   I don’t even know if she became famous, for I have never followed the lives of ‘famous’ people, at least not in any conscious manner.  For what is presented about them is an illusion, it really tells us nothing about what their private lives are like. 

So I am almost 60 and being 13 seems like yesterday.  I wonder what that tells me about my life, about reality, about meaning, and in the end, why I (we are) am here?  I wonder how things would be if the absolute temporality of our lives were really contemplated and believed.  How would time be spent, what would really be important, what would fall away. 

Death can be a fearful thing to contemplate.   There are all kinds of ways to deal with our endings, some better than others.  The worse however in my opinion is not to think about it at all.   Knowing the true nature of our lives, or perhaps a better way to look at it, the simple struggle to understand, leads in the end not to fear but to joy.



The present,
will soon becomes the distant past,
 each one of us,
 will one day be considered belonging to an ancient race,
 living in a time far removed from some future present,
so it goes.

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