For those of you, who have followed any of my meanderings, it can’t possibly come as a shock that one year drawing to a close and another about to begin, will somehow slip past, in spite of my sieve like mind. Even the ravages of time on my dwindling grey matter is still not sufficient reason to lose sight of the digital nexus.
I recently read a story about the discovery of cave drawings, somewhere in Indonesia. They clocked in at about 40,000 years old. It’s funny, if you’re a person, who looks around for signs, or more accurately, one who believes in them, they seem to appear unexpectedly. I knew the longer I waited for this year to draw to a close, the more likelihood I’d be tempted to reminisce and who cares what I think about 2019 anyway?
Then, came the drawing on the wall.
I am often focused on the passage of time in my life, now more than ever, as I am well ensconced in my 75th year. I am aware how my perspective on most everything has changed. I’ll tell you what I have belatedly come to understand about memory. From the precise moment something occurs, whether in deed, thought or feeling, it will change every single time you choose to revisit it. The math is also quite simple, the longer you live, the more you understand the completely subjective nature of time. The happier I am, each morning before dawn, the faster my 25 minute Zen sit goes by and the opposite is equally true, misery slows to tortoise time. You could say your state of mind, dramatically impacts your view of moments passed and the perceived length of any moment.
Now especially, as each year draws to a close, my own longevity becomes much less theoretical and more a validation of time remaining. Those of us fortunate to make it up here, have different ways of dealing. We’re all climbing the same damn mountain, but our view of the terrain varies for each of us, which is true no matter when you are in the ascent. Plus, we never graduate from school, time and circumstance our forever teachers.
I looked at that cave drawing and thought about how long ago it was inscribed. I started thinking that the less we are able to embrace the truth of our mortality, the less we can possibly understand our history on this place we call home. In the millions, I said millions, of years earth has been here, 40,000 years isn’t very long. I think it is hard for us to truly embrace our distant past, as individuals and as humans, small vs. BIG
Those early inhabitants were actually thinking and putting imagery on cave walls, which was a big deal. Even though, Raquel Welch roamed the earth far earlier, around 1,000,000 BC, there are no images to be found, only relatively recent, movie posters from what she might have looked like all that time ago.
History is its own off-spring of memory and it is subject to the same kind of fickle interpretation we experience in our own smaller lives. Hopefully, you and I learn from our past, trying to incorporate new perspectives from the ongoing changes internalized by the passage of time. Back then, the world must have seemed so much smaller and consequences much more immediate.
Only a couple of hundred years ago, Mona Lisa was painted on a canvas and the Pieta was sculpted. Thousands of years after those early cave drawings, great works of literature have been written. Around the same time, civilizations stole or inherited dominion over all the known land, plus all its sentient inhabitants, some with four legs or more and others with none.
Those early beings, back in the cave days, had a totally visceral connection to place. As their direct descendants, many of us, long ago, lost that primal bond. We sped up time with the priorities of conquest and progress.
Personally, I am in no particular hurry, because the length of my life highway is no longer some eight lane, interstate road to nirvana. I am continuing to learn that it only leads me back to myself, no matter what I drive or how fast I drive it.
In this year about to end, our seeming inability to come to terms with BIG TIME is a reflection of how difficult it is for some any of us to embody the truth of small time. Science, a tribute to our intellectual evolution, has been telling us all we are running out of time to mitigate the damage we have inflicted on this planet. We have been in such a hurry to distance ourselves from the cave. We will likely return to them, unless we take the time to remember history’s lessons today, for ourselves and all our neighbors.
I am grateful for 2019 and hope to keep learning in 2020!