We’ve all heard the expression time is money. Some have also heard that money is a human construct— and so is time. It seems outlandish at first. What do you mean, time isn’t real? Is that actually true?
For me, the jury is still out on that. Entropy is real. The changing of matter from one state to another is real. Ancient relics and civilizations that came before ours are real. But is time real?
Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, are all measurements, words we put on the little bits and pieces that make up what we consider time. That doesn’t necessarily make them real. Rather those measurements help us make things comprehensible to ourselves and (hopefully) others.
We exist in an eternal now, caught in the moment between a past that is irretrievably gone and a present that does not yet exist. This is usually what New Age gurus, online influencers and the writers of a great many authors of self-help books all mean by living in the moment. In a variety of ways they all seem to say the same thing: “Let go of the past! Stop worrying about the future! Appreciate what you have now!”
Except the past isn’t gone. It is all around us. In the air we breathe, in the faces that we see, buried in the ground beneath our feet and seen in the twinkle of the stars above our heads, the past is literally everywhere.
William Faulkner, a writer every good Southerner should have to struggle with at least once in their life (most often in their junior or senior year of high school), has a handy quote for this sort of thing: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The people, places and events that came before us are like noises heard from a distance. We stand at the mouth of a cave, squinting at the bright light of today, but from the darkness behind us we still hear echoes. The more powerful and significant those people, places and events from the past are, the “louder” they are and the longer their echoes persist.
Sadly, the most pleasant sounds are also often the most short-lived. It is a wonder we can hear anything at all over the explosive, clanking, mechanical, machine gun, car-honking traffic jam, talk show chatter of the 20th century, which is still echoing down the halls of history nearly two and half decades into the new millennium.
All of which is a long way of saying, think about what kind of noise you make in this world. Most of us won’t be leaving behind any significant scientific discoveries or works of art for future ages to discover — just noise and the echos of that noise.
The echoes of your best will be short-lived, like the song of a bird or a half-remembered lullaby, but the echoes of your worst will resonate long after you are gone.
Choose wisely.
