The Temporality Of Life

The dusty arid cliffs of Eastern Oregon rise from the land like monuments of the past.  Each crag and crease are skeletons of mountains long vanished.  Small pine trees stick out from the bone dry slopes, each green sliver pressed against the cloudless blue sky seems to cling precariously to life.  Concurrently every tree works to renew life by shedding pine needles adding to a sparse layer of top soil that dusts the rock foundations like hairs on a balding man’s head.  The enormity of the landscape seems to minimize my own presence as my eyes absorb the entirety of the vista stretching from one side of the horizon to the other.  I feel so small.

When you are young you want the years to pass, when you are old you want them to stop.  There is something about age that makes you appreciate lost time. Perhaps it is because we know our life is finite and with each passing hour it marches toward a final curtain.  I tend to think of my life in blocks. My son took twenty years to raise, twenty years ago I was 34. In twenty years I will be 74. It all goes so damn fast. 

How did the years vanish so quickly? If I pick a year, say 2006, and try to imagine what I did I have no idea. I know my son was 9 but I can remember little more. Instead I just recall moments, events and feelings.  Images flash in my mind, usually of happiness but with little context. There is a certain sadness as we age and feel the years slip by.  I think it is mixed with guilt that perhaps I did not make the most of them and it is nothing that can be undone. At the same time there is a reaffirmation that I must enjoy every day and use my time left the best that I can.  

My puppy is growing older also. He is close to nine years old and we have cared for him since he was able to fit in one hand. I lament every ache in his body. Each arthritic limp reminds me of his passing time.  I think in him I see a microcosm of myself and I relish each moment of life’s joy he seems to feel. 

As I look out the window of this cabin small on the side of a hill in east central Oregon I see a landscape as old as time itself. Mountains cut visibly with each layer of time. Colors echoing primeval forests and exposed fossils of animals alien from our world today.  My place in all this is as infinitesimal as a grain of sand yet in my moment I feel so much larger.  

There is no answer aside from accepting the reality that life is temporal and what we should value most is truth in emotion and contentment in having had the chance to live.  That in itself is a gift colored only by the opportunity to love and feel the love of those that have become a part of our existence. In that there is value as time overcomes us and our life is left to the memories of those we left behind.  Like the ancient cliffs before me our life becomes a speck in the color that paints the world with the pigment of all that came before.