To Ease the Passing of Time

They came to their favorite spot near the river and sat under the oak tree. He took out his pocket knife and carved a heart with their names inside on the bark of the old tree. “Why are you doing that,” she said. He said, “So that people long after we’re gone know that we were here, and to tell the whole world that our love will last forever.” She smiled.

A long, long time ago when people used to live in caves, a guy came back from hunting with his buddies. After they drank beer, or whatever they drank at that time, and his friends had gone to their own caves, he took a piece of coal to draw a scene depicting the hunt on the walls of his cave. The painting was found many, many years later, in 1940, and now everybody knows that he and his buddies were there, somewhere near Lascaux in the South of France, during what is known as the Neolithic Era that began around 10,000 BC and ended between 4500 and 2000 BC.

Why do we need to tell the people who will come after us that we were here? It must be in our DNA or human nature. The Bible says that we were created in the image of God, and that we used to live in some kind of paradise before we were kicked out for eating a forbidden fruit. There must be some element of truth behind that mythical story. Otherwise why would our thoughts be able to reach so far beyond our limited and fragile destinies? Could all those efforts to tell the ones who will come after us that we were here be a way for us to try to eliminate the boundaries between the past, present and future, and reconnect with something that we have lost? One thing for sure, that quest is universal and can be found in all cultures. People who lived far apart in space and time built pyramids that are strangely similar. They built cathedrals in Europe, temples in Asia, and all kinds of seemingly useless buildings all over the world for the same irrational purpose.

On a personal level, no matter how boring and insignificant our lives may appear, we still feel like sharing them with others, sometimes with people that we don’t even know. But why do we need to tell our stories if they are so similar to the ones of others around us? Maybe it’s because we all live our lives in our own unique and personal way. We discover love as if love never existed before us, and sorrow and pain as if sorrow and pain never existed before us. And because we have only one life to live, it’s like the whole universe was born and will die with us.

For me, the articles that I write and publish in my blogs are my way of carving “I was here” on the bark of a tree, or painting a scenery, or telling my story by writing songs or books.

I always found this song by Leonard Cohen very moving. A regular guy, just like you and I, in the middle of a very dark and thick night, is crying that he wants to tell his story before he turns into gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXz8S2VOCVA