Well, it has been 19 years since my last blog post. Nineteen years is almost a full generation ago. Amazingly, my site and old posts are still here - even more amazingly, and more importantly, I'm still here, alive and kicking!
When I consider this expanse of time, I am amazed at how fast this period of my existence has flown. It seems that it was 2005 yesterday and, in a blip, it's 2024 today. Despite my apparent perception, the reality is that a toddler in 2005, when I last posted, could today be the parent of a toddler.
Over this time, I've seen and experienced a lot of changes in myself and in the world around me, yet, I was so immersed in each moment that today is suddenly upon me. When we live in the moment, little seems to change, but with hindsight, much has changed, and from it, hopefully one can derive insight and wisdom. But what is time?
Time is the arch of change in our material existence: we come into existence, we mature, we generate the next generation of living people, and then we pass away.
Our lives and its development to be a chain of cause-and-effect: we are the effects of our parents who caused our existence, and whose own parents caused their existence, etc. Today's circumstances in our transient world are effects caused by prior choices and actions to bring us to this moment, such as it is. Ultimately, it seems we are advancing toward our final end. But what is that end?
Is life ultimately meaningless and then we drop out of existence? If so, then I think of Peggy Lee’s 1967 hit song, “Is that all there is?” with its futile lyric, “If that's all there is, my friends, then let's just keep dancing. Let's break out the booze and have a ball... if that's all there is." (and then you die). But maybe there is more meaning than we think.
If time is intrinsically united to transient material beings, then time itself is a transient phenomenon. It too had to have come into existence as an effect of an ultimate prior cause. But that ultimate prior cause could not itself be an effect caused by anything else, because it must itself be an ultimate source outside of, and beyond time, matter, and change.
We are the effects of this ultimate first cause. Although it is beyond us, it is also intimately present to us in the now - giving us existence in this transient time and beyond it.
Maybe our challenge is live through life’s changes, while abiding in that first, uncaused cause of our existence, in which we find ultimate meaning and fulfillment. This eternal first cause we might call God.
