The Funny Tricks of Time

There are days when living in the world becomes difficult -- customary things slip through my mind and little tasks become a burden. My head seems completely out of it instead of it's usual capable self. Today was one of those. I continually forgot little details that made me have to do things over and slowed down my work immensely. I seemed to be floating in the present, so focused on the immediate that I had no perspective. Living in the moment can be enjoyable and freeing, but if taken to an extreme it removes us from the world, limits our interaction and our ability to function in the way that is expected of us. How much do we need to be in this world? How much should we bend to it's expectations?

Time is horizontal and our identities stretch through it. Both the past and the future affect the person we are and the way we are living in the present. Living with a conscious knowledge of them seems natural and approapriate to mankind. We cannot excape time. It is a necessary factor in human experience, human perception, human life. But we are not slaves to it. We must seek a balance - a way to live in which we function in time but are not controlled by it.

Thinking about the role time places in one's identity helps reveal how intrinsic it is to human nature. Monsignor Sokolowski, a Philosophy Professor specializing in Phenomenology said in a lecture he gave:

If I'm daydreaming about something I did yesterday, I am now doubled into the one who was doing what I did yesterday. My identity is not found primarily in my present self. It's found in between myself now and myself then. We have this duality within our own selves. We carry around our past and our future. We live not only in our immediate surroundings, but in the absence of the future and the past, and we see ourselves in that future and past. Indeed, sometimes the memory is so powerful and intrusive that it won't remain past. It becomes present constantly, and that's known as a kind of psychological difficulty. Overcoming that problem essentially involves distinguishing between one's present self and one's past self. And one's identity is the identity that occurs between those two.

Following another level of personal identity, we can sympathize with another person and yet know that the other person is always irreducible to us. Wouldn't it be scary to have someone else's memory come up inside of you? Isn't it odd how when we see somebody we haven't seen for 10 or 15 years that we think of them as somehow alien because we realize they have so many memories that we never shared with them?

The rest of the article is quite interesting and he provides a brief yet clear introduction to phenomenology. It can be found at http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/newsletter/1999/spring/sokolowski.htm

Epiphany and the Past

I don't believe in time.*  Not in the sense of the passing of one second providing a magical break for all the world, especially a moment arbitrarily marked by pagan emperor's centuries ago.  Within the liturgical year there are many moments of new beginnings and times for reflection--the new liturgical year beginning with Advent, Lent which is a time for self reflection and sacrifice, and even Christmas.  Yet these are the opposite of clean breaks and instead invoke the past and the future.  Even Christmas, the celebration of the beginning of Christ's life on earth also invokes His end in the gifts of the kings.  As Chesterton says;

There were three things prefigured and promised by the gifts in the cave in Bethlehem concerning the Child who received them; that He would be crowned like a King; that He should be worshipped like a God; and that He should die like a man. And these things would sound like Eastern flattery, were it not for the third.

Enjolras wrote last New Year about the falseness of new beginnings, how resolutions cannot change your past--and perhaps that is why they usually fail to change the future.  New Year's resolutions foster the myth of advancement, the future must be better because of the unstoppable march of progress and time.  Christianity tells us the opposite, that because of the fall we will never achieve perfection on earth.

This is not meant to be a depressing or defeatist thought.  In fact, the proper response to this realization is to keep working towards peace and a world where everyones right's are protected, dignity is affirmed and basic needs are met, but the knowledge of original sin protects us from despair when this most assuredly does not happen.  But this knowledge that the future will not necessarily be better than the past also reminds us that a checklist of personal self-improvement projects are not enough--we also need reflection, study and knowledge but most of all we need the little baby born in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.  And this is the lesson Christmas teaches as opposed to New Years, for as Chesterton once again says;

Christmas is an obstacle to modern progress. Rooted in the past, and even the remote past, it cannot assist a world in which the ignorance of history is the only clear evidence of the knowledge of science. Born among miracles reported from two thousand years ago, it cannot expect to impress that sturdy common sense which can withstand the plainest and most palpable evidence for miracles happening at this moment. . . .Christmas is not modern; Christmas is not Marxian; Christmas is not made on the pattern of that great age of the Machine, which promises to the masses an epoch of even greater happiness and prosperity than that to which it has brought the masses at this moment. Christmas is medieval; having arisen in the earlier days of the Roman Empire. Christmas is a superstition. Christmas is a survival of the past.

*This is why this post is a week and a half after New Years and also misses Epiphany and the end of the Christmas season entirely, not because I have been lazy and too unmotivated to write.  

Shadows of the Past

It has been one year since this blog began, one year since we began this experiment in interaction. Since then things have changed. We are different people, shaped by the irrevocable flow of time. That difference has seeped through into our blogs, our topics, our voice, our presence has changed. My goals now for this endeavor are humbler--while this will always be a way for the three of us separated by time and space and life to keep in touch, to keep the bigger questions which do not always fit into the too infrequent catch-up phone calls in focus, no longer do I see it as a forum where what we shout to each other will affect the intervening distances. Sometime I do not even think that I am having a conversation with you let alone a dialogue with the world beyond. This experiment has been proof that the interweb is too impersonal, too big, too cold, too technological for a real debate. That is not why people turn to the on-line world--it is largely for escapism, for voyeurism, for socially acceptable stalking, for a chance to scream their opinions into the void, and often for a dose of schadenfreude. A genuine dialogue, developing in the void between strangers for no other purpose than to share each others thoughts has eluded us, and may be impossible in this medium.

While this experiment has failed I am not now tempted to take down this blog as I once was. For I have found a new purpose in it--a repository. It is a place where I can fix my thoughts, both in a effort to sort them out and as a record for me as to what issues I was concerned with and what I thought in the past, a diary or letter opened to our little public. It is a place for me to put poems, pictures and mostly quotes that inspire and amuse me. And through this sharing a new dialogue might occur, one less structured and less deliberate than the previous goal, but one occurring through the creation of a shared consciousness. By creating such a trove we at least create a common store of idea, of language and reference from which the dialogue can stem.

So two our 2 readers and anyone else out there who stumbles upon us, I have a favor to ask for our one year anniversary. Please, talk, think, point out something else that relates to what we are saying--respond in someway so we are not just shouting into the void.

The change, it had to come, We knew it all along

Time is like an ocean, sometimes rushing and crashing forward and sometimes rolling gently on, but always moving. Nothing in our lives is stationary for it is all a part of this constant flux. Some are more steady and do not so much change as shift and grow. This is how relationships are, with family, friends, associates, everybody you meet, some last forever and you spend a lifetime deepening them and others fade out. Certain people can be a huge part in your life, but then times change, you move or graduate from school or change jobs and some of those people are gone. You're left with the memories and the impressons.

This is what allows us to mature and enrich ourselves: new experiences, new people, new knowledge. We move through this life and use everything that we've encountered to make each new decision we come across. We have countless opurtunities to shape our lives and the world around us.

But time brings change and all progress has a cost. There are tradeoffs and sacrifices that accompany every choice we make and so with every gain there is a tiny, lingering sense of loss. There are, however, certain beliefs, values and ideas that I will not let change, certain people I will not lose. I've been told that this is part of being young and an idealist and as I grow older these passions will turn into a deeper but more detatched love and my dreams to change the world will shrink in scale. Well I don't know if I believe that's true, but even if it is at the root of who I am will still be the same ideals. There are certian absolutes in this ever shifting world which should never be compromised.