The Middle of the year is here again. I know..I know..soon the cold winds of Autumn will blow and right now..this very minute as I sit here with my wife relaxing on a perfectly good Summer day... that it will all be just a faint memory. "but life seems so long and death so complete and the grave an impossible portion to cheat."
Yet, the fact is life(as people often claim) is short..how we goin to know that? WE don't have such a perspective on our lives to know that it is short or long. Then there is the problem of subjectivity..is death at 25 short? 45? Maybe a life lived 25 years seemed long, 10 years ago at 43 seems like a long time ago to me..but is it really?..it seems to me that what "seems" to be the case is what really affects us whether it was short or not. But, if it seems short perhaps we'll try and do more things we are supposed to do? or want to do? If it seems long we could grow complacent and grow lax at what we are required to do.So long or short..who really cares!
In any event..What we do know is that each moment of life is fleeting..short or not..there is really no here and now. It seems like with summer we have so much time to get out and enjoy the weather,spend time with family and friends, eat hamburgs and hots, drink beer and cokes...play volley ball and go kayaking...but already its 3:00pm and I have yet to get up off my couch..and it seemed like I had all day!
Of course objectively 75-100 years is short compared to the concept of eternity. But we really don't know this. What we do know by experience..is what Steve Miller observed....time keeps on ticking ticking ticking into the future..
Miller's song repeats a rather fatalist picture of despair...put this in contrast to what Out of The Grey had to sing on this point: "when you wish you could capture this moment and hold it inside...remember this...beyond this moment the love of God exists...remember this..." I want to remember this when in the middle of January I am sitting on the same couch as I am now, looking out the same window except with quite a different picture than I see now and observe 2 things: Winter seemed so far away and so does next Summer...
