time

by

Retro Tuesday 4-20-2021

Do we leave a bit of ourselves behind in everything we touch, be it pencils, paper, a tree, a chair or even a moment of the day? A place where we’ve been, where the past and present and future collide? When I go somewhere, I can often feel the deep connection to the past. To the people who lived and loved there, to history going back hundreds or thousands of years.

The truth is, we probably do. We are all connected after all, down on the tiniest level, all made of the same stuff. You and I and the table and chair, the flowers in the garden, dogs, horses, everything in this entire world is connected at its tiniest points.

I once read that the breath I am taking now might once have been Lincoln’s. Or Cleopatra’s. King Arthur’s. Moses’. Or Joey’s down the street.

What an awesome thought that I breathe the same air as everybody who came before. That something of their lives remains and will always remain. For me, for my kids, my great-great-great-great grand-kids. (Supposing I have grand-kids at all.) That in their lives, they may breath the same breath which I am breathing now.

So do we leave something of ourselves on everything we touch? Of course we do. Nothing is ever created or destroyed. Just because we can’t always see it, or feel it, doesn’t mean it is not there.

I have my grandmother’s yarn basket in my bedroom and every time I see it, I think of her. Of the part of her which made that basket special to her and now, to me. If only a memory, she is there and isn’t that leaving something behind?

We all die sometime; there is no stopping that truth. But we aren’t gone because so much of us remains in everything which we touched with our lives. I like to think of my kids saving something of mine, whether a picture, a piece of jewelry, a dish or one of my model horses, something important to me, thus making it important to them. Something I have touched, something upon which I have left part of myself.

The past isn’t really past at all, not when everything we touch, everything we cherish, contains little part of us for all eternity.