Small Thoughts on Big Questions - by Winston

[ March 2007 ] [ May 2007 ]

Small Thoughts on Big Questions - April 2007

Ambushed by time.....

April 23rd 2007 15:28

"The older you get the faster time goes by." I'll never forget my mom saying that to me when I was little. At the time it didn't make any sense, of course. How could time go faster as you get older? Time was time, right? All I knew was that summer days seemed to stretch on to infinity, and the minute hand moved tortuously slowly throughout the school day.

And now, here I am. 30 years old today. How the hell did that happen??? Somehow, between the time my mom spoke those words and right now, I went to high school and college, moved to NYC for a while, moved back to Massachusetts, got married, and have now turned 30. Yesterday I was 8, playing in the woods in my back yard, and when I woke up this morning I had a mortgage and a receding hair line.

I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation. I think we all pause now and then and think, "whoa.....where did that 20 years go?" I don't know what to do about this. The more I think about it and try to hold on and slow things down, the more the sand slips through my fingers. The older I get, time DOES seem to go by faster. It makes sense, of course. When you're a kid, your time is broken up into chunks. School is interrupted by summer vacation. For a long time everything is a series of firsts: first sleepover, first dance, first time driving, first part-time job, etc. When everything is new it demands your focus. Being in school, learning new things.....this requires focusing on the moment. That sort of focus, I think, makes it feel as though time is elongated.

Fast-forward to real life: same job each day, no summer vacation, no learning new things all the time (not in the same way as during childhood, I mean). Sameness allows time to bleed together. The edges get fuzzy. Weeks go by now with a rapidity that I find continually astonishing. I've been alive for 1560 weeks so far. If I'm lucky I'll live another 2340 or so. It sounds like a lot, but I know that it isn't.

So maybe that's the secret then. Focus on the moment, enjoy the now. Learn new things. Pay attention to each day for the unique moment that it is, not the continual drone of time that it sometimes appears to be. Huh. I guess that's not really much of a secret at all.

Vote

Comments (7)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Winston - Category: No Category

Email this Post to a Friend

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut

April 12th 2007 23:39

It's been some time now since I've contributed anything new to this blog. Other obligations, distractions, and endless whatnots have kept me from focusing attention here. But, when a figure as essential and irreplaceable as Kurt Vonnegut departs the world, there is no justifiable way to allow him to go unheralded. So here it is, my few, fumbling words of tribute to a man who has already been drowned in it. Consider this writing one more drop in an ocean -- it makes no real difference, but every little bit helps.

My first exposure to Mr. Vonnegut's writing was about 8 years ago, when I picked up Slaughterhouse Five on a whim. I don't know what I expected, but surely it was not the seemingly-unfocused-science-f iction-but-actually-sharply-f urious-and-sadly-humorous tome that I worked through. I say worked, because while the book was slim, and the writing simple, the emotions were so genuine that one could not simply read the words and call it a day. I had to take on their weight, feel the pain, loss, and fragile hope embedded in them. This was work. Never have I read a book so seemingly light, and yet so deceptively heavy. When I was finished, I was left with the sensation of having learned something truly profound. If pressed, though, I would have had a hard time saying exactly what.

From there I was hooked. Cat's Cradle. Sirens of Titan. Breakfast of Champions. Galapagos. And on. With each book I began to understood their creator a little more. When each was finished and set down, the world seemed to make a little more sense, at least in knowing that it didn't make sense in the least. The worlds Vonnegut laid out for us were not alien at all. They were each our own, every one of them, with all the mystery, inhumanity, fear, violence, whimsy and hope of our own, only with the volume turned up to 11. Reading Vonnegut was like taking lessons in human behavior. These lessons were seldom flattering, but often true.

He had learned a great secret, it seemed, through his life of pain and misfortune. He said it best this way: "Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward." So he laughed, though the humor was as black as the bottom of the sea. Laughed at the knowledge that ultimately fate is the same, whether the path leading up to the end is good or bad, easy or hard. He took inhumanity and despair, and from these things he spun humor and hope. The hope may have been mingled with skepticism, but it was there all the same, pointing to our capacity for a better world if only we'd stand on our tiptoes and reach for it...

Now he is gone. A great light has gone out, as all lights great and small must, in time. I would like to wish him peace in the next life, if I believed in heaven. I would like to honestly give words of comfort to those who mourn him, and say that he has gone to a better place. I would like to believe that.

But I don't. And neither would he. The world will certainly go on without him, as I'm sure he would be the first to say. We will all continue on, with our lights going out in our own times. Eventually, we all end up as just old pictures in the family album. We all end up as faintly remembered moments in time, snapshots in the history of the old world. While we can, let us recall Kurt's picture fondly and often, before it fades. So it goes.

Small Thoughts on Big Questions - by Winston

Small Thoughts on Big Questions - April 2007

Ambushed by time.....

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut

Winston's Blogs