Time Bridges
A year short of my 40th birthday, I’m beginning to feel the effects of time in a way I have not felt them before. Things change once your life spans generations - you begin to realize just how truly and irrevocably separate those generations are. Especially now, in the information age where technology is growing exponentially faster, it’s amazing to me that I can remember the sound of the voice of a man who knew a civil war veteran echoing in my ears just as surely as I hear the custom ringtones coming from the iPhone in my pocket.
Have you ever considered that each one of us is a “Time Bridge”? Well, I should qualify that…. I’m speaking about those of us who are fortunate enough to live out our natural life spans. By Time Bridge, I mean that we are potentially the link between an event that took place years before we were born and an amazing story someone will tell a hundred years from now. Observe…
My grandfather went through the Great Depression. His schooling was interrupted by WWI. He was born in 1902 and had a relative that was a Civil War veteran. He knew that guy, and I knew him. That means I knew a guy that knew a Civil War Vet. My grandfather was a Time Bridge between me and the Civil War vet. There was the potential that I could have spoken to someone who heard Civil War stories first-hand.
Of course, I didn’t. I didn’t know then about my grandfather’s uncle and even if I had, I was too young to have appreciated it, and even if I had known to ask the right questions, there’s always the possibility that my grandfather never bothered listening to his old uncle’s war stories. But the potential was there, and if it was there for him, it’s there for all of us.
I remember when the Challenger exploded. I remember when MTv came out. I remember 9/11 and the OJ trial. I remember when Reagan was shot and when John Belushi died. There’s a very real chance that an old man in the year 2140 could be telling a young kid “I once knew a guy who remembered the very day that John Lennon died!”
It would be a story told from an old man to a young kid. The old man would’ve been a very young kid that I was talking to when I was old. It would be a time bridge from 1980 to 2140. And that bridge would be me.
That potential is in all of us, and it’s fascinating to think about. Equally fascinating yet much less happy is the realization that those time bridges are impassable, even between successive generations.
Tonight I was listening to some old audiotapes of my grandfather speaking, and I was listening to some of the stories he was telling. He spoke rather dispassionately about some of the things he’d seen and done. I’m sure his children would be very interested to hear these stories, but one of them recently passed away and the other isn’t far behind. The value of these stories is attenuated with each passing generation and I have to wonder if I were not here whether these tapes would literally end up in the trash the next day. I mean, who cares what Gil Skillman had to say about his days of playing baseball as a youth? These things don’t matter to anyone anymore, and when I consider that, I can’t help but see myself in that situation.
But here’s the sticking point in my mind… it’s only been 23 years since grandpa Skillman died, and to be honest, he didn’t leave much behind in terms of social capital. Not too many people spoke about him after he passed away. He didn’t have an estate. All that he was, ended one day, unceremoniously.
One day, your entire life - all that you’ve done, said, felt, loved, valued, thought, or imagined, will be irrelevant to this world. And there’s not really anything you can do about it. There are plenty of people here, now, that would love nothing more than to keep your memory alive. But they are in the same boat you’re in. They, too, face the reality that all we are, all we do, all we’ve become, all we’ve worked for and all we value is nothing more than a sandcastle on the shores of time, waiting for the tide to erase it as though we were never there.
I suppose that our lives do echo into the future - that some shred or modicum of who and what we are rings forward and affects those who come after us. Maybe some of us more than others. With the information age, our grandchildren will have much more access to the histories of our lives than we have to that of our grandparents. We can give them digital photos and online journal posts. But we can’t make ourselves relevant to their lives. We can’t do a single thing today to make ourselves loved by anyone who will be alive in 200 years.
The good news is that it won’t matter to us then.
Have you ever considered that each one of us is a “Time Bridge”? Well, I should qualify that…. I’m speaking about those of us who are fortunate enough to live out our natural life spans. By Time Bridge, I mean that we are potentially the link between an event that took place years before we were born and an amazing story someone will tell a hundred years from now. Observe…
My grandfather went through the Great Depression. His schooling was interrupted by WWI. He was born in 1902 and had a relative that was a Civil War veteran. He knew that guy, and I knew him. That means I knew a guy that knew a Civil War Vet. My grandfather was a Time Bridge between me and the Civil War vet. There was the potential that I could have spoken to someone who heard Civil War stories first-hand.
Of course, I didn’t. I didn’t know then about my grandfather’s uncle and even if I had, I was too young to have appreciated it, and even if I had known to ask the right questions, there’s always the possibility that my grandfather never bothered listening to his old uncle’s war stories. But the potential was there, and if it was there for him, it’s there for all of us.
I remember when the Challenger exploded. I remember when MTv came out. I remember 9/11 and the OJ trial. I remember when Reagan was shot and when John Belushi died. There’s a very real chance that an old man in the year 2140 could be telling a young kid “I once knew a guy who remembered the very day that John Lennon died!”
It would be a story told from an old man to a young kid. The old man would’ve been a very young kid that I was talking to when I was old. It would be a time bridge from 1980 to 2140. And that bridge would be me.
That potential is in all of us, and it’s fascinating to think about. Equally fascinating yet much less happy is the realization that those time bridges are impassable, even between successive generations.
Tonight I was listening to some old audiotapes of my grandfather speaking, and I was listening to some of the stories he was telling. He spoke rather dispassionately about some of the things he’d seen and done. I’m sure his children would be very interested to hear these stories, but one of them recently passed away and the other isn’t far behind. The value of these stories is attenuated with each passing generation and I have to wonder if I were not here whether these tapes would literally end up in the trash the next day. I mean, who cares what Gil Skillman had to say about his days of playing baseball as a youth? These things don’t matter to anyone anymore, and when I consider that, I can’t help but see myself in that situation.
But here’s the sticking point in my mind… it’s only been 23 years since grandpa Skillman died, and to be honest, he didn’t leave much behind in terms of social capital. Not too many people spoke about him after he passed away. He didn’t have an estate. All that he was, ended one day, unceremoniously.
One day, your entire life - all that you’ve done, said, felt, loved, valued, thought, or imagined, will be irrelevant to this world. And there’s not really anything you can do about it. There are plenty of people here, now, that would love nothing more than to keep your memory alive. But they are in the same boat you’re in. They, too, face the reality that all we are, all we do, all we’ve become, all we’ve worked for and all we value is nothing more than a sandcastle on the shores of time, waiting for the tide to erase it as though we were never there.
I suppose that our lives do echo into the future - that some shred or modicum of who and what we are rings forward and affects those who come after us. Maybe some of us more than others. With the information age, our grandchildren will have much more access to the histories of our lives than we have to that of our grandparents. We can give them digital photos and online journal posts. But we can’t make ourselves relevant to their lives. We can’t do a single thing today to make ourselves loved by anyone who will be alive in 200 years.
The good news is that it won’t matter to us then.