Linear Digression

Sometimes if you don't feel all the way connected, you can see about reaching into the past and into the future. Maybe that's where the rest of your connection resides. Maybe I'm not supposed to find it all in the present, and I'm desperately trying to make it all happen currently. That's interesting, because now seems to be all we've got. But which now? This now? (waiting a second...) Or this now? Or this other one over here? Are they distinct? Or are they intertwined? Something to consider while waiting at a bus stop and your heart ticks off several more nows.

Thinking how things tend to stay the same. The scenery changes, but those things that matter to a person don't really change. We can go through phases, and the phases don't redefine us so much as they accentuate what's been there all along. Yesterday and tomorrow, it's the same me despite being in different circumstances.

I've heard that history repeats itself, I've heard that the only constancy is change, and I've heard that the more things change the more they stay the same. I wish they'd make up their collective mind.

I guess it all depends on how you approach it, how much change you require before you want it to constitute change. It can be whatever you tell it to. I look at the passage of time, and I see continuation. I see less invention. We like to think as societies that we can create the new. But I wonder how much of it is new, and how much of it is a different take on a solitary principle. Hasn't there been a pattern of repackaging going on?

What if you could send a message to yourself in a different time? More than thinking of what I might want to say, I think of how I could get through to myself and make what I'm saying believable. Words can only take you so far, and without a proper vehicle for transfering those words, they fall on deaf ears. And I don't even know how much the words themselves would matter a whole lot. The very communication itself would carry the weight. When you look at someone transfixed, you don't see their words. You call upon another language for which we have no dictionary on hand. Our spoken verse makes attempts at grandiloquent adjectives, some more magnificent than others, some extraordinary, some stupendous. As if we know what those mean in any context other than how profoundly we feel them.

And then math tries to quantify and categorize into neat little rankings and groups so that there won't be any remnants left on the floor. Would that a world so tidy as the hypothetical could pertain to us.

I picture a distant future mostly hushed, with the breeze competing for the better part of the sound, producing a type of slow motion effect. It's where your mind might be able to do its best to reflect. That could be the vagueness we feel about things which have yet to occur.

Tapping back into reality for a moment, after cancelling a phone service which was on automatic billing, I was the recipient of a late notice for the final charges. If that isn't something upset by the continuum of time, I'm not certain what is. We have these microcosms of life all around us begging to be recognized.

Does it matter how much I owe them? I suppose it matters to them. But then why let them define what should count in the grand scheme of things? There are billions of things more important. Money's just another one of those quantifiers. They'll get paid off, yet not without a little philosophizing along the way to at least garner some lesson out of it and get my true money's worth from the experience. I think these are all clues, and clues can be learned from. Which isn't to say they have to make perfect sense.

So if I'm reaching out for some elusive realization — one that hasn't met me on the timeline yet — I can partially live it before it eventuates.

When we write anything, think about what it is we're doing. We're putting down thoughts, for what purpose? For one thing, we're calling out to someone in the future. It might be ourselves, it might be unknown people, it might be for unknown reasons. I want to talk to my other self regularly, and I miss that.

Which is to say: do we know what audience it is we're speaking to? Do we know how they might be receiving the message? I'm thinking that if we know our audience, then perhaps we are connected. Even if it is a little across time.