Closer to the Front

When my daughter was very small she used to ask from the back seat of the car if we were, "closer to the front or the back" when making long trips.  This, of course, meant, were we closer to our destination or closer to from whence we came?  We always enjoyed the way she toyed with language  and in how we just kind of knew what she meant when she said those things.  We thought she was so clever.  We continue to use some of her phrases today - in our own conversations - and the memory of her somewhat comical word choice always brings a smile to our faces when we include them in our own jargon.  I miss those days - they are gone forever while the memory lingers - and I can't return to them.  'Closer to the front' has taken on a whole new meaning these days for me,  many years now separated from my daughter's childhood.

It has occurred to me that what we are really talking about here is time.  Time is an interesting construct.  It's not human.  It's not even tangible, yet we feel it every day.  Everything about our lives is measured relative to it.  We use it to measure our days, our weeks, our months, years, decades, lifetimes.  We refer to it as a way of organizing our whole life.  We 'assign' tasks, appointments, dates, events, and all manner of life moments to this fleeting, intangible construct.  We have timepieces, clocks, watches, alarms, snooze buttons, stopwatches, and all kinds of machines that measure it. We think of events in terms of past, present, and future.  We have language constructs that give us tenses of verbs.  We relish in the genius of understanding yesterday and the excitement or fear about tomorrow - until it becomes yesterday.  Then it's history - and it cannot ever be again.  The very second that just passed will be no more...  Time organizes, and I dare say, controls us as a race.  I do not mean this is a bad thing - I suppose another organizational construct could organize us - day and night, or the tides, or the seasons - but even those too are constructs of time.

Recently I saw a video about the Hubble telescope that had been trained on the heavens in places where scientists believed there to be nothing in space - only to discover - over time - and the use of an extraordinary camera that there are millions of galaxies beyond the darkness - stars and planets, universes beyond our wildest imaginings and probably life forms, perhaps even like us in places, perhaps even like earth, in time, maybe even like ours...or not.  It just caused me to think about how small, how really insignificant we are in the grander scheme.

Nothing causes you to question your significance more keenly than death.  It's been said that the years you were born and died are less important than the dash in between.  It's what you do with the dash that matters.  True.  But, when you look back on the history of a person's life - some 60, 70, 80, 90 years, and you follow the timeline of events, the life markers of things that happened in that life, you feel compelled to apply significance to the existence of that life, that person, that individual - no matter the person.  Your mother.  Your father.  Grandparents.  Aunts.  Uncles.  Cousins.  Siblings.  Children.

These individuals held a place in time.  Their existence meant something significant and extraordinary to their contemporaries.  They walked, ran, played, talked, laughed, loved, cried, sorrowed, hated, fought, sang, hugged, competed, and a host of other verbs - in the past tense.  They were loved by someone.  They felt passion...

And then they were gone.
Time over.
Closer to the front.
Arrived.

We have choices about how we think about time. We can worry about it, use it 'wisely,' do good for others, pray, take care of ourselves - to the degree that we can slow the effects of time.  We can fear death.  But we cannot stop it.   In reality, time never stops - except it does, for each of us, and at some unknown moment our clocks stop.  We will get closer to the front.  We will arrive at our destinations, each one of us.

I continue to struggle with the 'letting go' of those who have gone before me - and most recently, my Dad.  I can't explain this except to say that when you are very young death is foreign.  It's something that happens to someone else.  It's outside of you.  You are distant from it.  There is still a lot of time, regardless of who the deceased is.  I think youthfulness is very protective. It is full of hope.   If you are healthy, vibrant, and relatively care free, being 'closer to the front' couldn't be farther from your mind.  But I am not what I would call, 'youthful.'  I am middle aged - in fact, I am probably closer to the front than I might like to know.  I hope I am not that close and that I still have a long trip to go - but I am most certainly closer to the front than the back.  And I think that the the crux of what this whole struggle has been about has been working through the recognition of my own mortality.

While watching a movie the other night sporting a stellar cast, who, in reality is close to the front in their own lives, one of the characters refers to getting older as "nothing but pain."  I reflected on that statement especially in light of the last year of observing my father's failing health and the pain he experienced daily and thought to myself, there is no truer statement.

That leaves me with the question of what to do with this reality.  It seems to me that there is only one way to think about this...that the God (or higher power) who created all those heavens - including those recently revealed through the Hubble - and yes, the Superior being who created  me and even created time intends for me to use my dash for the betterment of mankind in my space in time.  He intends for me to leave this world even a tad better than how I found it before I get 'closer to the front' and arrive at His door.  And, if along that route, I experience pain or rapture, I have to believe that He is on this journey with me, right next to me, holding my hand.  That thought is what gets us to the end of the trip; the promise of something better, bigger, more beautiful than anything we have ever experienced or could imagine.

The day will arrive when I will finish the journey.  I will reach the front.  Mom, Dad, and so many others have already succeeded in crossing over - getting all the way to the front - finishing the journey - completing their lives.  And so too will I.  With every passing second, I move closer to the front.  We all do. There is no escape so we must make the most and best of the journey to successfully move on. And when that time arrives, I hope to be ready and wildly anticipating the journey ahead.  I am looking forward to it.