THE DARKEST SPOT IN THE US
We live in eternity… the eternal present. We have never, nor will we ever experience anything other than the present. I’m pretty sure that we come equipped with that understanding. But the idea that today is the point of today can’t be effectively leveraged by the world of commerce… so a great deal of effort has been dedicated to convincing us that we should always be working towards something. That tomorrow is the point of today and that yesterday is the key to tomorrow.
This result of this thinking is that we’ve come to view the past and the future as being more real than the present. I find it amazing that in a world where we don’t agree on a common language, currency, or system of values… we have all agreed on the shape of a clock and the increments of time it represents. And I think we have been staring at clocks for so long that when we think of what we mean by “now”… or the present we think of it as the shortest instant that’s here and gone over and over again. Like the second hand of a watch – so thin it’s barely visible – sweeping around the face on a countdown to oblivion.
No doubt this narrative starts way before school… the average third grader can identify hundreds of corporate logos but fewer than a dozen plants and animals indigenous to their hometown. But once school begins… well… the story realy picks up steam. The point of Kindergarten is the first grade, the point of the first grade is the second grade, and so on. The point of elementary school is college. The point of college is the corner office. And the point of the corner office is retirement…. to get back to the time when today was the point of today.
The irony? It’s all us… doing it to ourselves. And if not for the fact that the conspirators are also the conspiratees (pretty sure I invented a word there) this would be the greatest conspiracy story in history.