the eternal enigma

  Man has marked the passage of time since the earliest of times. The evidence of that can be found on cave walls and in the most modern computer. The atomic clock marks that passage accurate to within one second every million years! At least that is what the scientists and engineers will tell you. I think that time is an illusion. I see no way to measure something that has no beginning and no end. Time is infinite, it is man that is finite, at least in a physical sense. So why the interest in marking the time? Why count what has passed? Do we feel that it has value in the future, in what is to come? But what value would time have in eternity? Death is eternal, isn't it? Religious belief offers us all everlasting life, that's the promise of God, of faith. So, is everlasting life an illusion? These are all questions that have been asked as long as man has been marking time. It's all a mystery. A mystery man is trying to explain. 

 I think that the best we can do is work toward the present. We can't work toward a future that we will never see. By the time the future arrives, it's today. There are those that proclaim they can see the future; they have done so just as long as man has asked those questions. Sometimes we pay people for that "knowledge" that is mere speculation. Mostly we pay for what we want to hear, or what someone else is paying for us to hear. The ultimate influencer sees the future! But I don't believe anyone can see the future at all. If that were true, they would win every lottery, every bet, every gamble in life. You can't see what hasn't happened. All we can do is count the time that has passed, record those events, and work towards a favorable outcome for ourselves. Everyone's vision of the future is different.

 We are all aware that our time here is finite. We don't know how long that time will be, however. There appears to be a force far greater than we controlling that. There is no other explanation for life and death. It can happen at any moment, at any one second. There are two forces, one good and one evil. We can't change reality. We are either alive or dead. There is no middle ground. Life is binary. We may describe our perception of that in different ways, but the reality remains. Being alive and living are different conditions altogether. Only the person can define that. We haven't heard the opinion of the dead, yet. But none of that explains our need to keep counting. 

 Time is an illusion. It's a perception of existence. There are those we call "old souls" and those we call visionaries. The old souls draw from the past in some fashion while the visionaries look past the present time. Perhaps the truth is both are drawing from the past or from the future. Do we count in an attempt to position ourselves in eternity? That is to say, define our point on the graph of eternity? We existed from x to y. Attempting to define existence on a two-dimensional plane in a three-dimensional existence. 

 The futility of living. But we can't allow ourselves to think of it in that fashion. We all need to believe that we have a purpose, a reason to exist. Therefore, we mark time. This is what I have done in the past. I can do more tomorrow and if that isn't enough next week, month, or year. We mark our trips around the sun. It is what is observable by man, unaided, by simply watching the sky. Time is important. It was more so in ancient times as a predictor of the seasons. Perhaps that was the original reason to mark the days. It was a matter of survival. As long as there is time, we will survive. Perhaps that is the reason we still count the days, marking time and celebrating its' passage while praying it never ends. The eternal enigma of time. 

Happy New Year.