Sunday, July 1, 2012

The speed of life

Too fast. The speed of life is too fast. Life speeds up as we age. It seems that way to a lot of people. People who notice, as children, how endless summers soon end too fast, and finally become a mere blur as the school years flow by. Four years of college seem not long enough, and then we're out in the real world. Working, working, time slowing only during the five day work week and then speeding up once again for two brief days of freedom. Freedom to clean our home, wash our clothes, shop for food, and children? Well, not in my area of expertise, but I've been told that life with children equals a definite parallel universe of speeding time running alongside and competing with everything else.
Fast? What is fast? As opposed to slow, it's much faster. The speed of life, the speed of light, the difference? An endless, consecutive series of nows versus 186,000 miles a second or 700 million miles an hour. 
We exist in an ignored, unrealized vacuum of nows. Our nows can be yesterdays, todays or tomorrows but only our nows are constant. Instead of living in our nows, we dwell on our yesterdays and make plans for our tomorrows. Being in the present, by not wasting our nows, is something spiritual, semi-devine earthly beings have been instructing us to do for centuries.
Time flies. Nows fly faster and faster, at the ever increasing speed of life. Surely there is some algorithm somewhere that magically and Einsteinically [my word] explains why this phenomenon happens. There have to be prescribed sets and subsets of numbers and figures, with drawings and arrows, that show how we start as droplets from a faucet, fluidly falling downward, unaware we are simply forming ranks, as we hit bottom, with the already circling masses, speeding up exponentially, as the circles become smaller, until we finally flow down the drain.
Down to where? Is the journey just finding our way back to what we know, as Eliot promises? Is it Churchill's riddle, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in mystery? Will this mystery be solved at the end (or beginning) of the trip? We share the trait of curiosity with our feline creatures and this is the greatest mystery we've never solved. Faster and faster, round and round, down and down. Curiouser and curiouser. Do we depart or do we commence? It could be the adventure hasn't even started yet.

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