Continuum

I read, or heard, once, that Life is like being adrift on a vast ocean, and needing to rebuild the entire boat plank by plank. The existentialists certainly described our plight quite aptly. We are constantly thrown forward, from birth, into circumstances we have very little control over, and are hard pressed to understand them. It doesn't take much of an imagination at all to see the absurdity of things. And ugliness, if looked for, can be found at every corner. And our perception is so limited, not really cosmically geared (yet) to take in all the details. I mean, do you remember what you were doing on February 17th of last year, right off the bat? Besides working, or celebrating a birthday. I mean, right off, what color shirt were you wearing? Were you in jeans or slacks? I mean, cosmologically, a year ago February is but a split second, yet what do we know, even personally, about what went on? This is because from birth, we've been trying to play catch-up. We have this conscious mortal earth bound self that does the primary perceiving and limits what we can see and experience. All we can say with certainty is things tend to be a certain way. But we don't know really the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, or that the moon will course through the day and night skies. These are but predictions and guesses at what may (should) transpire. Realizing consciousness has only provided us with a partial picture of our lives, we can see where all the darkness comes from. And space. We, phenomenologically, have so many gaps in our understanding, so many unnoticed things, as in the mood of a coworker on a certain day, heck, even the mood of a spouse on Thursday of last week! No wonder darkness falls! But the sun does shine, and we do have moments of transcendence, moments of grace, moments of clarity and this is where all the light comes from! And then there is of course intuition. We can shortcircuit the neocortical logical center and go straight to the heart of the matter. If a child is endangered, or we are about to do something stupid, we can react without thinking and properly to boot in the first case, and turn on a dime in the second case, and avoid disaster in both cases! But intuition has it's costs, in that experience is blurred, and we may perhaps may not know or remember how we saved the child when it's all over, and we surely will never know what all pitfalls we have avoided by turning on a dime! So, what is an answer? To realize that life is a continuum. We are floating down the stream whose beginning or ending is infinite. There is that part of ourselves that can perceive this flow when we're not in the lockstepped, clock dominated, day to day rush of things. If we are doing something we enjoy, time can fly by, and things can just 'click'. The Universe seems to appreciate this sort of mindfulness and rewards us during such times with good experiences, pleasant times, stillness and equanimity and calm reposes. We can step outside the linear scientific time we've become so accustomed to and just let things happen, and more, experience things as they happen. These, I have found, to be some of the most rich, rewarding times and experiences I have ever known.