Last day of Camp (August 5, 2005)

The idea of tomorrow soon becoming yesterday certainly puts a myriad of things in perspective. Who you spend your time with means nothing. What you put your effort becomes trivial. Priorities become minutiae as time condenses.

Conversely, the idea of God’s time or nature’s time expands time. Things last as long as they are supposed to. The past and the future are considerations but not the root or the goal of the present. What you do has effects and history. Suddenly everything that exists has purpose.

Much as emphasis is placed on the future and study is based in the past, the present too has a focus. Living in the moment encourages not thoughtlessness but dismissal of all that has come before and all that will eventually be. Nothing has consequence and nothing has reason.

Perhaps living in time as it happens is the ideal. Acknowledging that everything has a beginning and an end makes the horrible more bearable and removes the instinct to anticipate the ending of good things. Waiting, either for something to begin or for something to end wastes the beginning and ending of those things coming before or after. Without this seemingly necessary waiting time, how much more could everything be appreciated?

Applied to day to day chores, this gives queuing reason and acknowledges it as a process, not as a frozen state. Applied to people, it equalizes importance and influence and denies any one person the ability to destroy. It seems that the corollary should imply that one person is also denied the possibility of creating or of causing great joy. However, I prefer to think of joy not as an event but as a continual state that we step in and out of like a stream. Thus, unlike destruction and desolation, it has no real beginning or end so it cannot be limited by the actions of people.