Consider This
Just on the tail of reading about the possibility that trees can communicate with each other… If ever you have to tackle issues about permanence, consider this thought from Steve Grand:
Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place… Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
Now, I guess this isn’t entirely accurate. Apparently there are some molecules that remain in the body for great lengths of time. But the spirit and the message of the quote remain the same. Surely you can’t assign ‘yourself’ to those few molecules. As Richard Dawkins suggests, we share many more similarities with waves than we do any static ‘thing’.
I’ve always imagined my existence and all of the universe to be like the smoke that rises up from a match. If you watch it, strands come together spontaneously to form a design and then instantaneously break apart into a new shape. The whole show seems capricious and designed. If you could capture one of those moments, that exact moment where it all comes together, that is the universe. We are strands of matter and energy that have come together for just a split moment to form something. Now imagine that your entire life, the entire span of the earth, the entire history of the universe. All of it has taken place in that split second moment, and at any moment (which may be billions of years away, or not) it will all break apart and rise up like smoke into something new and unfamiliar.
I think Will Oldham understands this when he sings: “Did God make time to keep it all from happening at once?”
It’s all a matter of perspective.
