Clocks are inhumane. It doesn’t seem to be to be an overly dramatic statement. We don’t think of time in the way that clocks represent time. Clocks measure out the seconds and do not sympathize or recognize human experience or sentiment.
Clocks are a basis for dehumanizing activity. We move and act (in this world) according to a regiment that our bodies and biology itself does not recognize. We submit to a kind of objective or absolute view of time that doesn’t exist.
Sam (my oldest daughter) was lying in bed with me (I was tucking her in) and she reached up and touched my quickly whitening beard and said “you are getting older Papa”. There was significant thoughtfulness in her eyes and voice.
I rarely have moments of future nostalgia. It was like recognizing that I was in the future somewhere being nostalgic for the instance that I was experiencing.
The comprehenstion that Sam showed of what it meant to get older and the edge of fear in her tone (she is just now putting together the cycle of life) made me rebel against the truth of the statement, in the only way I felt I could to assuage her unvoiced concern.
“yes, but I’ll be around for a long time baby.”
Everyone was looking at me hopeful and encouraging, but before it had begun I new I had failed them. The crushing, outside of time silence with no real end played out, as they do. Topics and numbers swirled around in my mind, funny how they know to stay just out of reach. They had nothing to fear I had somehow lost the will to try and catch them.
so difficult to achieve sincerity? I think it has to do with our innate adaptability. It’s the only explanation that I can come up with. We are in revision.
Given contexts we are infinitely in revision and that is no more apparent or a reality than when we are in particular contexts (family events, reading a book, writing, creating … whatever). It is inclusive.
if we are redefined at any given moment then we don’t know who we are at any given moment and as such our suggestions are merely reinforcements of who we wish (or think) we are.
As would be necessary under these auspices our thoughts and feelings at any given moment are suspect, they don’t tell us who we are but eternally who we were and as such represent our backwards method of self-actuallization.
We drive to work everyday navigating by looking in the rear view mirror, an interesting scenario of building ourselves by looking at where we have come from.
