
One thing the discipline of journaling does it to bring full force into my consciousness the ceaseless flowing of time. It is wonderful to be able to look back over the events, people, situations, and even the dreams of my life, but at the same time it is somewhat unnerving to ponder that today’s entry and the events and thoughts recorded in it are immediately swept into history. That history grows more distant in a smooth, even motion, but for some reason it is startling to stand at certain points along the way and look back and realize just how distant points in my history have become. It’s much like watching a child grow up. You see that child each day, and she grows all the time, but every so often there is a startling epiphany of just how much this child has grown. It’s almost as if you suddenly saw her grow before your eyes. Without the objective evidence of a date’s notation, it would often be difficult to remember if certain things happened two years ago or five.
It’s amazing how often reflection about time itself comes up in my journal entries. It’s such a compelling phenomenon, I suppose it’s inevitable, especially considering how focused on the specific date and hour each entry keeps me. I’ve often tried to reconcile my aging with memories of my youth. I remember once when my mother, starting into her eighties, looked at me with a sense of panic and said, “I’m old! How did this happen?” She was having one of those epiphanies of existential terror that we all go through from time to time, and no doubt these epiphanies become more dramatic to the soul as we get older.
Here’s a reflection on this very topic from a past journal entry. It was written on a loose sheet rather than in my regular journal, and the only notation of time was a year – and a very fateful year, because not long after I wrote it, my mother died:
From an undated journal entry in 2001:
The child...I watch my little girl (15 now) walking about the kitchen, and I look at her with a heart that could almost burst with love, and I think...what happened to the little girl who was four? Then I think ahead, ten years, twenty, and where will this little girl be...the child? But then I think, the child is there...the 4 year old, the infant, the 12 year old – all there. How about me?...I'm still that little boy sitting on the couch wearing green shorts and picking up gumballs with my bare toes. And Mama...still John White's little girl...and Grandpa, still a little boy growing up in the 19th century...in all of us the child is there. No one will enter the kingdom of heaven, Christ said, unless he or she becomes like a child.
1 comment:
"Man...that was awesome....I enjoyed reading that Mr. Jim...."
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