cpt_ray

There's one thing everyone gets wrong about time. It's one of those things that keeps surprising me - I suppose you could say "time after time."

Everyone thinks the events that anchor time are the big events. Wars...Great discoveries. All cultures in all of the universe focus on the wrong things when teaching history, at least when it comes to what history itself latches onto. I can't say I blame them. The wars and discoveries are like gas giants when you look into cosmos. But it's all size and no life.

It's not that they aren't important events, I guess, but - believe it or not - they're easy to change. A word in the right ear there. A death here...and then it all shifts around. It's sadly easy to get the so-called 'big things' made or unmade.

Here's what doesn't shift as easily. The big secret of time, space, and thought:

It's the little personal moments. It's the births and the deaths. It's the smile you flashed to someone who becomes your best friend. It's that fight you have with a parent or that job you took instead of the other job you were offered.

It's all those little moments that never happened - at least as far as the official record is concerned - because these moments are legion. An infinite number of anchor points based on each person being in the right place at the right time with the right thing to do.

Don't believe me? I don't blame you. As egotistical as we can be, being that important is intimidating. I'll prove it.

We all have these moments in our lives where we did something that made absolutely no sense. We were in a time and place and we acted like our programming up to that point didn't matter. Circumstances came together in the right way and it just happened. And when you get out of whatever fog you were under, you can't believe you did whatever that was - good or bad. That's zaqiri. That's a moment that needed to happen for time to keep going and most of those times you don't talk about because they're personal - and maybe a bit insane. There's no excuse for them.

No excuse is needed, because that's just what you needed to do at that time. If you want to know something odd, those moments don't shift. Not without an insane amount of effort and, when do manage it, time trembles. You can jump from parallel timestream to parallel timestream and - for whatever reason - you will still wear yellow shirts while off-duty and drink your coffee with the same amount of sugar in each timestream. Most of the time, the same girl will still be pretty to you and you'll have the same scar from climbing those rocks by your house that your mother told you were too dangerous.

Enough of those little things get uprooted - blue shirts instead of yellow - and things start to unravel. The constants changed into variables and there is no solving for 'x' anymore.

None of this excuses your choices or what you do after those inevitable moments. If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that owning up to those no-mind moments and sifting through the consequences is what makes time capable of existing at all. Those small moments always seem like they're followed up by days, weeks, maybe years, of focused thought afterwards. Where we are in time can be measured by how close or far away those little, personal moments are in the rearview mirror and what we did about them.

So, I guess I have to ask you the most important question you will ever be asked: What now?