It is no life to live not realising that catastrophe is possible, that the safety and comfort of the present could suddenly turn to naught. It is no life to act as if pain and death do not exist. It is an empty life, a fearful life, because we deep down do know we could not get what we want… we can’t face that fact. We can’t face that reality is full of futures we might not wish to have. We want to hide with our heads in the sand, face away from the window of our room, just so as to avoid the ‘dark futures.’ We cannot look in the face of the pain and loss others we know face, or the pain and loss evident in history and in other places far away.
And when we fear pain and loss, we are the worst comforters to those who go through it. And then when we go through it, we know that since we didn’t wish to go deep into another person’s darkness and grief, nobody else will do that for us! It is what in our minds we think is normal- avoiding the pain and facing hard reality is normal to us, so we cannot grieve. We think we have to pull ourselves up from it, and that inevitably includes ignoring it, I have found.
It does not mean you can’t tilt your hat at its existence, say words that acknowledge that pain was there, but you can’t face it. You can say, detaching your heart from your words, that you’re sad that someone died. But if you were to look at it, you’d see that it opens up a whole train of thought that alludes to the fragility of life, which we hate to face. We wish to extend life, and because we are so hell bent on that, we cannot stare life in the face- part of knowing about life is knowing about death. You don’t know life unless you know that it could-have-not-been.
You can’t fully live if you do not face that life is that dance at the edge of death. Life could so easily be put out, like a bit of breeze puts a candle out all of a sudden. Life is as fragile as a candle’s light, as fragile as a crystal glass or a bit of expensive china. But also it is akin as precious, comparatively, as those things- we wish our lives, and the lives of those around us, to continue just as fervently, or rather much more fervently, as we wish for our precious crystal and china to last. We take care with our lives as we take care with a fragile object.
We should not be afraid to see that. It does no good to turn away from that fact, that any random accident could happen. It is all in the air around us to fear this fact, so we are addicted to safety, to finding all ways we can to prevent calamity, to prevent that little wind from coming and puffing out our candle of life, puffing out our fragile civilisation.
What if we stopped fearing this? How could it be better for us?
I realize that this isn't what the entirety of the post was about, but I became fixated on something in the opening sentence, and it led me down a train of thought, which I thought might be worth sharing.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a dance with time is, to me, deeply paradoxical and fascinating. This is because my conceptions of time and dance are inextricably linked. It is time, after all, that makes dance possible. For that matter, it is time that makes music possible. If all the notes of a symphony were condensed into a single point, rather than being painted across the canvas of time, none of its beauty would be visible.
(One could take this even further, since any audible sound is built out of some combination of frequencies, and frequency itself requires time in order to even exist as a concept. But now I'm getting way too analytical, and losing the original thread of what I was trying to say.)
Dance, itself, is not only an ancient and fundamental part of the human experience; it is also a powerful symbol for so many other parts of that experience. Sound is an invisible dance in the air. Light moves gracefully and effortlessly through our world, dancing with matter, and revealing its beauty and majesty.
This would not be possible without time.
And yet, so often I find myself in an antagonistic relationship with time. Perhaps, more precisely, I find myself frustrated by a culture which seems to be obsessively in love with its own concepts and beliefs (and superstitions) about time.
I'll stay off my soapbox, and not enumerate these frustrations here, but the bottom line is that this ongoing irritation (which extends all the way back to my childhood) has left me somewhat bitter and resentful of time, and of the (IMHO) oppressive power that it wields over so many otherwise-rational people.
The image of time, not as a dictator, but as a dance partner, is beautifully captivating to me, and is a very comforting "reframing" of a long term conflict.
Thank you!
Cheers,
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|)ellman Cryde
Thank you for these thoughts! I'm glad it was helpful- reframing 'old conflicts' with ideas is a wonderful thing to happen, and something I keep trying to chase doing in any of my many 'conflicts.'
DeleteThe back-up to this idea that you make, the point that it is necessary for music and dance that time exist, means a lot to me. I was just arguing a bit with people about how 'time is a social construct' which irritated me a lot. I think people mix up the idea of Time being contingent on things outside of it to exist with the question of whether Time exists at all. Time being contingent (anything being contingent) does NOT make it not exist. It just makes it exist only in those particular conditions, just like the Law of Non-Contradiction takes into consideration.
Over the years, I've wavered back and forth about whether or not I believed that time actually "existed" as anything other than a perception created by memory, but at this point my reasons for accepting it as "real" are partly theological and partly scientific.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that time, as we experience it, is the fruit of The Fall. It seems to me that the merciful presence of time is what allows us the opportunity to repent. The sins of our past could never *be* in the past if there were no past for them to become a part of. There could never be any distance between ourselves and our broken actions, and they would be an unrelenting and constant presence. Perhaps death itself is merely the removal of an individual from time - suddenly, all the darkness and light of a human life are condensed into a single point, and everything which time had obscured is revealed again.
In the realm of science, there seems to be ever-increasing evidence not only that time exists, but that it is demonstrably affected by movement (i.e. relativity). Perhaps even more surprisingly, I'm also told that the development and ongoing maintenance of GPS satellites has demonstrated that time is measurably affected by gravity as well.
All of which, for me, provokes yet another thought. If movement requires time, but time is fundamentally affected by movement, then it strikes me that time and movement are, themselves, involved in their own beautiful dance together.
Ultimately, with regard to time, I'm forced to observe that I've probably spent far too much of it on this tangential reply, so I'll sign off with one of my favorite statements about the nature of time, which comes from the late Sir Terry Pratchett's book Small Gods:
"Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you."
Cheers. :)
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|)ellman Cryde
Hmm, I never struggled with whether time existed because I am living within it, but I also knew that it is also contingent, as you are describing. To me it is one of those created things. I don't know if it is a result of the Fall, because I would be very, horribly sad if cause and effect (as in making a thing and then getting to enjoy the result, in time) weren't part of redeemed life. But I am told it's beyond my imagination... I just have to say that if I have to let go of this 'making things in time' part of life, and learning over time how to make things better, I'd be pretty sad. It's one of the areas in which I keep planning What To Do Later! Human skill seems to be a very Good thing, so I hope God doesn't want to nix it.
DeleteI like all the nuances to reality... but we'll see what happens to be the case later on.
I would be more inclined to envision the abolition of time as the triumphal *marriage* of Cause and Effect - having finally overcome Time's relentless efforts to keep them apart. Without the "corrupting" influence of time, "good" things would always feel "good", and "bad" things would always feel "bad". There would be no need to convince ourselves that the aching muscles from a workout session would somehow eventually lead to greater strength and comfort, nor any need to wait for a hangover to tell us that we'd had a pint or two more than is good for us. The results of a choice would manifest themselves *with* the choice, not hours, days, or years afterward.
DeleteAll of this is, of course, a gross oversimplification, because we don't really have words for accurately describing life or actions outside of time - and if we did, we probably wouldn't understand what they meant anyway. I'm also kinda playing devil's advocate here - I don't have a strongly held belief about this, but I find it interesting to speculate about, and I'm enjoying being challenged by an alternative perspective.
Ultimately, I guess I just enjoy thinking about concepts, such as this, which are too big for me to comprehend or rationally come to terms with. It's why I'm fond of hyperbole - when my mind is repeatedly pushed *so* far outside of its comfort zone that it must struggle to make sense of things, I can't help but hope that the associated mental "muscles" may eventually benefit from the exercise. :)
Hmm. I rebel against these things because I really love the ache after I exercise... and it itself makes me feel I am getting stronger (perhaps I often told myself that). I remember listening to The Horse and His Boy and 'putting myself through' what Shasta was going through learning to ride. I wanted to be able to stand things like that, and become stronger inside.
DeleteI like anticipation, too, and I somewhat hold out for heaven now realising that maybe God wants us to be able to experience discovery and the building of skill there as well as here. But there it would be 'without our fallenness', somehow, and with His blessing always.
But I honestly don't know how things will be. I just really hope I get to experience that; it's entirely a selfish reconciliation of myself to the idea of heaven (because people throw out a lot of words about what it'll be like; what won't be there, and what will, and some of the things I wasn't so happy about). I often wonder if I'm ungrateful and selfish to 'have conditions' like this.
You make an excellent point - I find anticipation to be a very strong argument in favor of the beauty and value of time. Anticipation is what makes a story compelling, and it is the storyteller's skillful management of that anticipation which makes the journey a joy or a drudgery.
ReplyDeleteI have 101 other thoughts, questions, and musings on this subject, but that's a big part of the reason that my responses have been increasingly delayed - whenever I sit down to write, I rapidly got lost in thought.
Perhaps the ultimate reason that I get so grumpy about time is that I never can seem to find enough of the stuff. Ah well, I suppose I'll just have to be more prudent about how I spend what I'm given. :)
Cheers!
I'm both glad and perhaps sorry that you get lost in thousands of thoughts when you think about this subject, and thus lose your time. I'm glad that my thoughts added something to your speculatings. There is probably a lot to be added to this topic which people may have done for centuries already. ;)
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