...the Present Before

There are days when I seriously wonder if my grip on sanity is only slightly tentative. Have you noticed how a single day takes ages and ages to complete while the plural of day, days, races by like a stampede of cats! There seems to be endless days going by way too quickly. Doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe you’ve also noticed that there is no time but the present? There was, of course, a present before the present now, but that was also the present. An older one.

I wonder what the shortest-living creatures on our little planet think about? I suppose some 24-hour-living brand of water fly speaks nostalgically to the fresh evening hatch of water fly about the good old hours; the hours when the sun was in the middle of the sky and it was much warmer. Maybe they recount stories of near death experiences from their youth of flying too close to the water and narrow escapes of the great silver water creatures. I wonder what trout think about? Infinite in life compared to the wee water fly no doubt.

There is a grove of Huron trees on a Tasmanian mountainside thought to be 10,500 years old which somehow places them alive and well with unicorns. Baby Noah didn’t even have great-grandparents yet! That is a lot of birthday candles, cake, and calories (not that a tree that old would want that much fire around it). I wonder what they would speak of? “The winters aren’t what they used to be. I remember proper glaciers and real ice – none of this ‘snow is here and gone before you know it’ ice. You call this winter?! I remember when I was a sapling…” At which point the young trees would look embarrassingly at each others feet and shuffle off.

Have you ever sat on the hood of your Volvo and stared at the stars? What you are seeing now is a piece of the present before; a cosmological event that took place much further back then long winters and unicorns. Close to a star’s supernova is not the safest place in our expando-verse to have lunch, (though lunch at the edge of a blackhole wouldn’t be much more dangerous – just a little more painful), however, lunch in the flickering light of that supernova hundreds of thousands of light years away may get your significant other in the mood. According to Canadian pollsters ISPO-REID, fully 5% of Canadians (roughly 1.5 million Canadians), say that 70’s rock band KISS gets them in the mood. 2% say that dinner and a movie do it for them.

There is something about the present before that makes the present now seems so much more significant. My grip is tightening.