Someone will read this post and scoff at what they perceive as its absurdity. It’s actually more reflective than it might look.
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Finally, after what seems like a month-long holiday weekend, a new week is beginning to unfold. A more “normal” week, lacking most of the celebratory overtones of Christmas and New Year’s Day. But the energy of the celebrations that began before Thanksgiving never matched the intensity of holidays in years past. Adulthood strips the excitement away from them. The reasons for those festivities were clearly expressed to children, but some kids seemed to privately question the legitimacy of the explanations. They always were subject to suspicion. Stories about religious communities that practiced peaceful coexistence and believed in miracles—paired with a new year bringing spiritual renewal and rebirth—met with both youthful exuberance and skepticism. The experiential wisdom and emotional pains that accompany age, though, tend to heighten uncertainty and temper enthusiasm. Eventually, passionate ideals fade into dubious fantasies. Hope sinks beneath suffocating ritual. Purpose slides into either tolerance or, more often, grudging acceptance. Maturity transforms what passed as faith into resigned acquiescence. I have vague recollections from my childhood…thinking stories from children’s books were more realistic and believable than the fantasies sold in in shops and churches. Even then, excitement balanced precariously on the thin edge of disbelief. Subsequent years wore that thin edge into a solid platform, a place I could sit in relative isolation and comfort as I watched my excitement plunge off that ledge into the rocky abyss below.
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Similes and metaphors replace realism when facts are so unlikely that fantasy is the only believable option. When that is the case, we invite others into our imaginations by painting, with words, abstract images that are essentially self-portraits. A problem, of course, is that self-portraits reflect a mirror’s perspective; an image that is reversed from left to right and right to left. Therefore, our attempts to illustrate far-fetched reality begin with a distorted vision, further perverted by the recipient’s understanding of the sender’s interpretation. A simple example: I describe a young White man with words that you interpret to paint in your mind an image of an old Black woman. Clear communications between people cannot exist in such a twisted world, except by accident. And the odds of that accident taking place between the right people at the right time in the right place are infinitesimal. Yet, the incredible occurs with statistical certainty.
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The likelihood of ice, snow, sleet, and other cold-weather phenomena taking place sometime this month and/or next is relatively high. So I say. Predicting when that might occur, though, is an undertaking best left to meteorologists. They have knowledge of weather and climate patterns I lack. They have access to meteorological measurements and measurement devices that are unavailable to me. They have the advantage of collaborating with others of their ilk to develop and present forecasts, increasing the likelihood of reaching consensus about future weather conditions. That having been said, my assertion about the likelihood of cold-weather precipitation is little more than a random guess made by an untrained, uneducated, unequipped amateur whose qualifications to speculate about the weather are essentially non-existent. Given the value of my prediction, why would I bother to take the time to make it? Why would anyone else take the time to consider it? What could I have done with my time and energy to improve the world, had I not wasted it on such a useless activity? As I consider how I spend my time, I suspect most of it is used in useless pursuits. That’s probably true of almost everyone else, as well. If just one tenth of my wasted time were spent in positive productivity, I might have made an impact. If everyone spent a similar percentage in similarly productive endeavors, Saudi Arabia might be a country awash in vegetable farms with enough output to feed the rest of the world. Imagination. Fantasy. Delusion. It is possible, I think, for the right combination of committed people to shape those dreams into reality.
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One edible before bedtime sent me into a deep, deep sleep. I may have had a dream, but I am not sure. I may have budged during the night, but I am not sure. I woke late this morning. My starvation is getting the best of me. I am hungry for a flame-broiled steak, cooked rare, with a dozen plain doughnuts available for dessert. I might not eat all the doughnuts, but their availability would give me a sense of safety and comfort.
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Every day brings us closer to the last one. And it increases the temporal distance between the one before and the ones before that. I think Time is elastic; flexible, like a rubber band. Time can be stretched, but it springs back to its original shape…up to a point. If the pressure stretching the rubber band gets too great, the tension breaks the its connection with itself. I suspect Time works in much the same way. When time is drawn out, it must eventually reach a stage at which it reveals its weakest point; an almost explosive detachment in which tension between its beginning and its end surrenders to its original scope…always or never.
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Somewhere between near and far is an unnamed distance that represents a point at which neither is superior to the other. That unnamed spot refuses to acquiesce to claims of proximity by either of them. That location is similar to the “special interim relationship” between North Korea and South Korea; neither here nor there, but equally and adamantly not both. Similarly, now and then belong somewhere in between, but precisely where is unknown. Perhaps when is more descriptive. Yet where and when share intersecting, but inexplicable, attributes.
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Give the right answers and the questions will ask themselves.
