Life Discoveries # 10 - Context

     This one has been whirling around at the edges of my tiny mind for the last 2-3 years, one of those Big Things, one of those ethereal things that keep will-o'-the-wisping away every time you try to pin it to the wall. And will go on refusing to jell into clarity until I've written something down and pushed the words about. Too often for me it's the only way, so you'll need to bear with me while I ramble about a bit.

     Along a lot of the Adelaide beaches' esplanades there are coastal erosion barriers made up of large boulders about the size of washing machines, surely taken from some very large holes up in the Mt Lofty Ranges, which are said to be about 500 to a 1,000 million years old, when "Australia" was down about where Antarctica is at the moment.  And coming back from early morning coffee we walk past these rocks, and I can see them trying to tell me something.

      It's the ones that have the ancient river or ocean bed still in them that get me the most. They're saying to me... "Hey pal, you're just a tiny piece of The Big Story".

    The thing is - we need to, every now and then, stop and put our lives into that self-same Big Story. Put ourselves into Context.

     The other week I was going on about our life being a journey, and mine will go from 1938 to about 2028 or so, and that will be the total time span of the universe as far as I'm concerned. Unless the Buddhists are right and we all get to go around again if we haven't cracked it this time! Which gets me back to this Context thing.

     The universe (well, this one anyway) has been ticking over for about 14 billion years and may or may not go on for another 5 billion. That's a fair bunch of Time. So apparently my pissy little bit of it is in the latter half of about 20 billion years.  So, it all bumbles on for 14 billion years, and then I pop in for a few moments, and then I'm out again and it just keeps on going. And in the context of that sort of time, in fact all of human existence has only been a flicker in the eye of Whatever dreamed this lot up. And that seriously impresses me. Impresses me because that same Whatever has gone to a whole heap of effort to … to … and that's where the wall is. The WHY? wall. The WHY? wall that no amount of religion or science or philosophical pondering has ever broken through. And probably never will.

      So what do I conclude from all this in-depth key-poking? Other than words.
             (1)  We find out only when we die, or...
             (2)  We won't find out anything, so...
             (3)  In the meantime, don't waste the journey. And leave as many stories as possible, of what you found along the road, to help light the way for the next ones. You could do worse things with your little scrap of time.

      There is one thing. I've always imagined (the Romantic in me that is) that if we were to write every story that ever existed, we would get to see what was on the other side of the Why? wall. What d'ya reckon?

            T.R.E.

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