Spring Time Thoughts

When I was on the beach last week, I gave my son a teaspoon of philosophical reality. I stamped my foot into the wet sand and pointed that footprint to him as the surf washed over it. In a second, the indentation was gone, as if it never existed in the first place. That, I said, is our life on earth. It is but a vapor in the vastness of oblivion, a barely noticed flash on the endless riboon of time. As the preacher (not The Byrds!) in Ecclesiastes said: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die." In the local cemetary, I came across a ninety year old grave marker that had toppled over. As I turned it upright, I wondered if anyone today even knows or cares that person lived or died. And I realized that the day will come that no one will know or care if I or anyone else for that matter lived or died. Man is not the measure of all things as I'm reminded of Shelley's poem Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Even if our faith takes us to a belief in the afterlife or in reincarnation, it doesn't mean that our life here on earth is much more than a ripple from a pebble tossed into a boundless ocean, a twig swirling into oblivion. That said, our response cannot be cloud-dwelling morbidity as life is to be lived, and it is our awareness of death that gives life poignancy and urgency. We are always hearing time's winged charriot hurrying near, and it is this knowledge that brings us closer to what and whom we cherish. For me, this means spending less time with tele-evangelists and tele-politicans and more time with my family and friends, and less time worrying about stuff I can't do anything about and more time enjoying the stuff that makes up my life.

To life!