Time is the best censor

Chopin said it: “Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.”

I am not sure he meant it totally like this, but it sparked me.

What people or events will be relevant in 200 years?

What names will be remembered? Einstein? Hemingway? Gershwin?

What events? 9/11? Pearl Harbor?

How much of the present that we wade through is at all relevant for future historic perspective?

I got to thinking… so many people reek of the wanton lust of seeking fame. But what’s the point? Where’s the relevancy? I mean… American Idols are forgotten in a year, artists topping the charts are unheard of in 10 years, the greatest writers of the decade step through the door that echoes a silent abyss….

even United States Presidents get foggy after 50 years….. athletes retire and their names are uttered in millisecond-length stats that are so offhanded as to have no meaning or perspective.

What is your legacy?  Is it yours, or are you part of a larger legacy that is ours, together?  Maybe I am not history, nor are you… but it is history that happens with our combined experiences.

What if you don’t have a legacy?  What if your memory doesn’t last past your grandchildren?  Is it a concern?  I think it is… in the sense that we have been liberally peppered with a cultural awareness of legacy that is supposed to transcend this human time frame and bond you to infinity.  I like to think that I am aware that my end will ultimately toll the bell for my life’s energy and existence, and that as my basil ganglia stops orchestrating time in a linear fashion and I am released to a new freedom….. my concerns for legacy and permanence will ebb out of my toes like my energy and thoughts will race through my capillaries attempting one last moment of cogent reality.

I am starting to think Salinger was right.  Focus on the Tao, find peace with a lovely woman. Well I have the lovely woman. Ever do I seek peace.  Maybe it’s time to step away and focus on those things….

In the end maybe it will be okay if we bow out and escape.  Hide.  Commune… with ourselves alone, to better understand what is so deeply ingrained in us that we so rarely have time to understand.

What are you doing?  What are you working for?  I feel petulant addressing arcane truths that only seemed pressing during my initial sentience… and that resulting punk drawl that festered in my confusion at the systems in place for my future.  I was SO angry about these things back in my younger moments, but then I found the Tao, and the crushing blow of maturity.  Then I found that I need to work, and that basically shuts up a relatively decent amount of academic discussions.  So yet another discussion turns down a barren road and you begin the highway grind, honing your axe as you whittle it away bit by bit, year by year.  Are you still at the same desk?

I realize not everyone speaks fishbits I have been told that before….. so the deciphering will continue until this server or host blinks out of existence.  I have been told time and time again

So how worn down are you at this point?  I feel sharp as ever, but approaching a nub.  When will our tools become less than functional?

So the race…. to wear down to a broken wick.  Is. On.  As Millay’s candle burns at both ends, our night is a lifetime that cannot last infinitely.  So where does one find their relevance?  Or is relevance eventually derived in peacefulness and calm?

Is it that our search for center of self is buried in standardized templates for social operations?  What if we were to break it…. the patterns the systems that fucking mold of that brittle glass that is a conversation that trails to nowhere because it cannot be perceived as more than angst ridden philosophy?

I am not sure any of us will be relevant in any way in the future to any degree at all.  It doesn’t take much from the present, to be frank.  It does make me think this pace does not saunter – it blends at a stultifying rate, and it might be time to slow things down a bit.

Salinger understood it and revoked the fame that dawned on him in 1953…. I think he was aware that his relevancy was not only pigeonholed to that book forevermore….. but that his name had as little to no relevance as a string of letters arranged……. just ……. so.

I mean… big things are remembered, and the others fall away like a slough disappearing into the sea…. all those events and moments and meaning lost in a greater cultural combining of endless anonymous stories driven by memes in a global game of operator.

I am not delving into my own insecurity about legacy so much as realizing that our consciousness of legacy spans the human time scale, and if you start taking some level of a bird’s eye view, all that will wash away on a grand scale…. and nothing will really stand out but the penultimate moments of history.

I think it’s freeing.  I think.  It could be construed as lonely and cold and chaffing my ego and desire to be accepted with a timeless litany or epochs end over end that celebrate Fishbits day with hugs and statues.

This is a lightning strike… and honing my awareness.

“Now or never” might not be the right thought, but be aware that it is *ONLY* now, there is no later….. and we might all just end together in this sad infinity.  It isn’t miserable… it’s possibly truth.  Or at least a concept to ponder….. but it should be like winter’s last breath coursing over the cliffs into the dawn of spring…. one where we can commune together in eyes and smiles and do nothing more than hold each other in our gazes and arms and breathe.