What efforts we make to defeat the limits time imposes on us! Our whole lives, however long we live, are like the span of a gnat, hatched, matured, and dying over three days. Our ephemeral bodies cannot shelter us for anywhere near as long as it would take for us to live out our dreams, our ideas, our imaginations.
In the Middle Ages, religious people pushed back against time, by creating the idea of an eternal life hereafter - a comfort especially to those most disappointed in life on earth.
Inexorable Time! but our imaginations can still push back against it. We can explore the time before we lived, and through history and stories go back to the past. Through diaries and records of my grandmother I can participate to some extent in her time - the thoughts she had about the people around her, the experiences of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1870s - which were so different from my own childhood in the 1930s.
And we can leave something for our children and grandchildren to explore in the future - sensations of our own time, the distilled views of moments in our lives when we were most alive.
We may not step outside time's rolling current, but we can through our imagination live in the past, and through our creative leavings, preserve some of our sensations for the future.
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Bravo-This piece captures the meaning of time in human history-our own existence in a continuum from the ancient past to a brief present and an unknowable future. We can enrich our lives through the study of history, arts and sciences, and other pursuits of understanding our heritage-including the origins of our own families. Global traveling opportunities can enhance our understanding and appreciation of the world and its people and history. Today's technology provides the power to learn more and more, and the ability to record our bits of knowledge for posterity.
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