The movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could’ve been better, but the one thing that sticks with me is the notion of time and how it can affect us. I don’t remember which class I was in when we discussed time in specific detail. It is never really discussed enough, is it? In this class, we mentioned Thomas Aquinas and the idea of human beings existing in Time and God existing outside of Time.
We are stuck in this web. I tend to picture the movie What Dreams May Come. There is a giant spider web and we are trapped inside of its sticky comfort.
It might be silly, but I do tend to revisit my past. I ask myself what things I would change if I had the opportunity to do things differently. There are a great many things. More things than I would like to admit.
I wish I was more assertive. I wish that I was less afraid of other people’s feelings and more mindful of my own. The movie I watched this afternoon truly offered the idea of “carpe diem.” We should seize this day. We do not truly know when we will have another. Oh, we assume. Human beings are great at assuming, but quite frankly, we cannot boast of anything more than this second we are living right now. It could all change in a heartbeat.
Human beings are so very, very fragile. We are as strong as we are weak. An infected paper cut could kill us. We could also survive being shot, poisoned, drowned, and God knows what else. Human beings possess the most fragile strength of which anyone could conceive.
We are covered by a thin membrane. Anything could pierce it. Yet, there are babies abandoned in the dead of winter in dumpsters who survive through cold, cold winters. Human beings are a fascinating lot. This year, I hope to understand this body a bit more. It is the only “true” thing I have been given.
1 comments:
I wonder if our very temporality moves us to forget time. We are bombarded by change and the shifting of the world from states of pleasure to pain sweeps us up, making us yearn for stability that time defies. Or maybe we're just to busy being in time to be thinking about time.
Yet, strangely, even as we seem to overlook time, we also dwell on those things that tear us up and reveal our transience. We notice pain because it's the temporal successor to pleasure.
But rather than really focus on that "other side of pain" - that which came before and will follow, in time - as your title suggests, we tend to remain on this side of it. Unfortunately.
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