I am dealing with some endings. Of course, I am not unique. People deal all the time with all sorts of endings. Every day in my community and around the world, people die. The family, friends and a few others take a day out of normal time to remember the deceased, while the world spins on in its usual business. Anyone who gets older will find out that death becomes more of a reality in our lives. We read about friends who die. Our parents usually precede us in death. Death is but one form of ending.
Every spring and sometimes other
times during the year, young ones graduate from college and high school and
other kinds of programs. Again, if we
are lucky, a few folks gather with the graduating ones to celebrate, while the
world spins on in its usual business. Other
kinds of endings also happen. People get
fired from a job and that often is a lousy ending. No one gathers for a party in this case. Young folks apply for jobs and are told they
are not qualified or that someone else is better. Those rejections are cruel endings of young
dreams and aspirations. Once more, there
are not parties for this one.
Endings are normal occasions to
reflect on time. Most humans know that
life is a march through time. We
celebrate birthday that marks our march in years. Our sense of time is framed by our beginning
which virtually no one can recall.
Typically, we live on this earth for three years or so before any memory
of “me” being or doing something is lodged in our brain. At the other end, we are all aware that our
march through time is temporal. Unless
we have lost our minds, we know that our life will end in death. Death punctuates the importance of time, even
if we lose this awareness of its importance in our slow daily lumbering through
the days.
I like to ponder these kinds of
things and realize they always come into sharper focus when I encounter an
ending of my own. I have
graduated---more than once. My parents
both preceded me in death. As I get
older, I am experiencing the death of more and more of my friends. Some have been younger than I am, which
forces me into a kind of awkwardness with my sense of time. Maybe it is true that we each have an
expiration date, but somehow that notion makes no sense to me. Of course, I will expire in this form on
earth; but I don’t think there is a predetermined date. I am temporal, but mysteriously so. That’s reality.
I come to a consideration of
reality. I never read much of Kafka, but
I do recall one line that speaks of reality.
Kafka says that “Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in
the immediate moment of one’s own life.
It is only there that it can be won or lost.” I like this because it puts a different twist
on reality. I suspect that the average
person is like I am in their assumption that reality “just is.” Reality is a given and we don’t think much
about it beyond this. Kafka surprises me
when he says reality can be won or lost.
I am not sure I know what he means, so I keep pondering it. There are many people who help me think about
reality.
One of these folks is the Danish
philosopher, Kierkegaard. He was a
masterful thinker and incredibly prolific writer who died much too young. He was one of those geniuses who seems to be
able to look deeper into reality and see more that the average person. One example of this is his reflection on time
and eternity. Kierkegaard picks off one
moment of reality and says of that moment, “The moment is not properly an atom
of time but an atom of eternity. It is
the first reflection of eternity in time, it is the first reflection of
eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.” I will go along with Kierkegaard. If I can understand one moment, then maybe I
can finally understand it all. Kafka
tell us reality is accessible in one moment of time and Kierkegaard says this
atom on time is an atom of eternity.
When Kierkegaard says that this atom
of eternity is a reflection of what eternity is, I feel like I get a
glimpse. If I try to put it into an
experience, I think about one of those moments when we feel deeply love or one
of the moments when our hearts knew the profundity of joy. I have had both experiences. We know what it is to be in a moment of one
of these. That is to be in an “atom” of
eternity. In time it seems it will not
last. But as an atom of eternity, it is
already everlasting. Maybe both are
true!
To understand that truth requires an
unusual level of awareness. Sadly, most
of the time, I am not living with that much awareness. Too often I am caught up in the trivialities
of time and content with superficiality that I miss any whiff of eternity in
that moment. The key to it is
awareness. It is so simple, but so
hard. Everything about our contemporary
culture and lifestyle dictates against this kind of awareness. No wonder we know so little about
reality. And that is where endings come
back into the picture.
Endings jar me back into more
awareness. Endings make me vulnerable to
reality in rawest and rarest forms.
Tough endings usually are even more jarring than good endings. It is little wonder that tough endings are
good ways to lead to reflections of eternity.
And when we get a little better at this reflection, then with more
awareness, we can live more deeply into reality. And when we do this, we are already more
fully into eternity.
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