Living Forever in History

You know, life is full of lessons. Some are fun to learn. Some are dull. Some are painful.

The painful ones are probably the ones we learn best. Or, perhaps I'm better in saying, are more firmly grounded into our hearts. Whether we learned them best or not is a matter for debate.

For instance, why do we return to a painful relationship looking for joy and acceptance when we know it just isn't there? But we do. A lot of us do anyway.

One of the more painful - or at least humbling - lessons we can learn is how little we matter in the Grand Scheme. Assuming there is one. But even if there isn't, the truth is, our importance is fairly relative. Or, should I say, our lack of importance is relative. In other words, none of my relatives are important. haha

But I have been reminded in the past week that before I entered this world people were living lives just fine without me. They had no concept of me. And life was grand. And when I leave this place some day, people are going to continue living their lives just fine without me. Eventually, there will be nothing left to tell people I was ever here. And nobody will care.

I guess that's what makes the present so much better for most people. They weren't there in the past. And they won't be in the future. Their time is now.

For myself, I find I don't think of the future so much - except as an extension of the past. My life takes place within a chapter of a much longer story. Relatively speaking, I guess I'm a paragraph, or a sentence, referring to some obscure character who may, or may not, seem interesting to the reader, but who the reader will never learn more about because the story has moved on - while I have not.

Most of my stories send out tentacles into the past. It's the way I write. WHY is this person like this? How did his come to be? Who are these people? History is such a fascinating thing.

I believe it is possible to traverse time in reverse. Some day, barring the world's destruction, people will find a way to do it physically. For now, memory is the road to the past.

Written accounts are best for going beyond our time. Some times they are needed for our own lifetimes, too. Memory brings us back. The page in the diary. The entry on a blog. A letter written to a friend. Email saved and not destroyed.

The past is the reason we can change. The reason we won't sometimes.

This blog contains memories of people who were most precious to me: Daddy. Stephen. Lynahr. Cile. Grandma. They're all gone now. But part of who they were while they were here is contained in this blog. So others can know they existed. And that they were interesting people. Worthy of being loved by anyone.

I guess that's why I'm finding I can never leave this blog for long anymore. I've tried to quit it. Several times. But if my time is short I want there to be something left that says I was here. I want people to be happy about some of the things I wrote. I would like people to say, "Bevie James seemed like such an interesting person. Wish we had met."