Time.

Working on the last couple week’s blogs, got me thinking about time. A hundred years ago – 1926, my grandfather was 26 years old, had a wife and a family, and would live to see some of the most innovative changes of all time. It was only a hundred years ago. A hundred years always seemed like forever to me. Like, FOREVER. If someone reached 100 years old, they were OLD. It was amazing and celebrated – whether they were happy to be alive or not. But now, as time passes on and I am in my sixties, my brain is seeing it differently. The era my grandfather lived in was so different than our time of technology, to try to live there with our experiences would be difficult. And it was only one hundred years ago.

When I was blessed to visit Scotland, I experienced some of their history which was powerfully affecting on the mind. They have thousands of years of human history that most of us third to sixth generations cannot begin to fathom. Standing in Mary Queen of Scot’s bedroom and then entering the antechamber where her husband was brutally murdered – wow. The feeling is indescribable. Then standing on Culloden's battlefield where so many Scots died was so disturbing, I wish we had not gone there. Especially after standing in the room where a film of the battle was played all around you. As if you were in the middle of it.

Time. It really does seem to go faster the older you get. But the realization of its passing plays on the mind as well. The sense of all people, all history, all motion is blended together, is so connected; it is frightening in some ways and binding in other ways. Why don’t we learn from our past mistakes, if we are so connected?

I’m not entirely sure where I am going with this understanding of time being drawn out over our span from another’s and on to another’s’, but I’m going to think on it a bit longer. Maybe there is no answer to it. Maybe there is only time. It keeps moving on. With or without us. Maybe that is why it is hitting me - I am drawing ever closer to the "without me" moment in time. How shall I hand off time to another? Shall I leave joy, anger, accomplishment or failure (more than likely all of them and more)? We should not be so hard on ourselves. We are all fragile yet strong, right and wrong, good and bad. Let's make the best of the time we have on the infinite lifeline of Time. (And if your parents or grandparents are still on the lifeline, be sure to visit them and find out who they are, what they love, how they lived. Before you know it, they are gone, and you find yourself with so many questions, so many longings that can never be answered. Remember Time keeps passing...)