3:41 a.m. - Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003
Ms Leslie finds no utility in futility
The lesson I never quite learn is that there are people out there who think of me when they don�t have to. I don�t think I can get used to that. Take Valentine�s day, for example. I think of that day as a day for someone else. I don�t hate it. It just doesn�t apply to me. So I�m amazed then, when I get Valentine�s greetings from summer-gale, crazylady-2229, life-my-way and invisibledon. I have no way of knowing if they�ve sent these greetings individually, or if I�m included on a long list of people who get a greeting on Feb 14th. Either way.. it doesn�t matter. What matters is that I�m somehow a part of the thinking process of these living people. How strange is that?
Let�s think about this.
Most of us don�t especially want to die. It�s too scary to imagine ourselves as non-existent. Why that is, I�m not exactly sure, but it is. That�s why we�ve invented religions, gods and creation legends. We want to believe there�s an existence that transcends mortality. We want to think we�re more important in the universe than we really are. I�m the same way, really. I�d love to think I mattered. The concept of existence after existence is awfully attractive. But the brutal truth is, on the long timeline that stretches from never to always, none of us matters anymore than the biblical sparrow. God doesn�t see the sparrow fall. Neither does he see us. We matter for the tiniest of moments, and then only in the eyes of those we touch.
My portion of the eternal line began just a little over fifty trips around the sun ago. Somehow, the sun got along without me before that. My time will end before I get around the sun fifty times more. Then I�ll go back to wherever I was before my journey began�. Which is nowhere. Nothing I have will matter for long. My little plastic cowboy milk pitcher with the six-gun spout that I�ve loved all my life will go to a flea market or the garbage heap. My silk flowers in the little vase, my best friend teddy-bear, and the plaster figurine that means Christmas to me will quickly lose their meaning. I�ll exist only as a chemical imbalance or a stream of neural impulses in the brains of the few human beings I leave behind. In fifty years after I go, my children will go, and the occasional impulses that are me will go with them. In another fifty years, my grandchildren will go too, and with them will go further traces of me. This is how we die; Not all at once, but gradually, over time. A thousand years hence, even the greatest of us will be forgotten. In ten thousand years or ten thousand times ten thousand years, no one will know we were here. Sooner or later, we must vanish, along with our planet, our moon, and our little star.
The only way to matter is to matter first to ourselves, and then to those around us. This is as close to immortality as any of us will ever get. I�m not the first one to realize this, am I? So when I matter enough to someone out there, even someone I�ve never seen, to make a comment on my dairy, or to send me a Valentine�s wish, or even just to spend a few moments of their life to read about mine, well, then I�m honored. More than that, I�m a little bit more alive.
We�re all time travelers. It�s not a voluntary trip. It�s a short distance down a one-way corridor. We can only go forwards, never back. Our non-consensual journey ends with our death rattle. It never lasts much more than a few years.
But someone a hundred and fifty thousand years ago or more extended their trip through time. They did it when they smashed two stones together, striking sharp flakes to use for tools. The flesh that was that person is so long gone, but the tools remained in time. Through them, those ancients speak to us. They tell us something about life in their time. The tool maker who only wanted to scrape flesh from an animal hide didn�t realize it, but he (she?) spoke to us in the future.
In a cave in France, someone who knew they could time-travel spoke a new language. By drawing pictures on the wall, they left themselves behind as a signal and marker to us. They told us what was on their mind�. Meat. And they signed their work by leaving the sooty outlines of their human hands on the same wall. How marvelous is that? Those few ignorant people traveled through time all the way to us, and they matter to us. They help us know who we are.
Now the cave wall is replaced by the internet. We�re all furiously marking our own walls in unseen spaces. I�m travelling now, and my extended trip will last as long as the words I�m writing. It�s possible that these very words will last beyond my children and theirs. In a hundred years, someone may come across them and read for a moment. I will have reached out my own hand and touched someone all those years from now. The words mean nothing. They�re just a long stream of ones and zeros. But to think that the thinking thing that is me could speak a single word to another thinking thing that hasn�t yet even taken a place on the eternal stage. Well, I think that�s just pretty impressive.
So, what if I �could� speak a single word to the future beyond myself. If I could only say one word, what would it be?
The man in the cave gave us his hand. What a fabulous choice! Can anyone call him ignorant? With that one thing, he told us that we are like him. That we are FROM him. He made us a family. With a single �word�.
For most of my life, I think if I had considered my one word to the future, my word would have been �futility�. I know, that�s really sad� but that�s the word I think of. Lately though, just sometimes, that word doesn�t seem right. When small things happen�.like an unsolicited Valentine wish from someone who didn�t have to do it�.those small things remind me that futility is a relative term. Yes, of course, our existence is futile. In the longest part of the long run, nothing we say or do means a thing. But in the short term� in this very moment� the things we say and do mean everything. They are all we have, and to waste our moments in time just seems like a kind of surrender to futility. And oh how I hate surrendering.
If I�m to be futile, I�m going to go into futility kicking, screaming, and dragging my heels all the way.
I need a new word.
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