"Just Look At What You’ve Started!"
by John Wilder
"I find myself, time and again, beginning work that I know I will never see completed. My time here is finite. That fact sits in the background of everything, the ticking clock. Still, I keep launching projects where the meaningful results, if they arrive at all, will show up long after I am gone. Sometimes the gap stretches into decades or even centuries. The work starts now because the window for starting is now, even when the finish line sits on the other side of my own existence.
An example of that is the oldest written joke that we know, which is a flatulence joke. It’s not even a good joke. Heck, it’s so bad it’s not even Amy Schumer-tier. But we know it. And it was a seed planted, thousands of years ago. A proverb captures the feeling cleanly. It is often traced to ancient Greek sources: a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. The personal version lands just as directly. I am planting metaphorical trees under whose shade I will never metaphorically sit. Or fart. Or whatever.
Having children supplies one clear case where we build that future. Earlier generations treated reproduction as something that largely happened without deliberate long-range planning: a Saturday night and a bottle of wine and, boom, Julius Caesar was born nine months later and was off invading Gaul nine months after that. Biology and circumstance and the Roman Legions carried most of the load. Today the choice sits in the open.
I began a project whose success or failure will play out across lives that extend well past mine. The uncertainties related to having children arrive immediately, and stay. What sort of people will they become? What attitudes will they carry into whatever conditions they meet? How much of what I do now will actually matter when they make their own choices? Will the daily work of guidance and example turn out to have been enough? What sort of impact will they have on the lives of others?
These questions do not come with easy answers. I did it anyway, fully knowing that large parts of the outcome lie outside any direct observation I will ever have. I’m tossing a message in a bottle into the sea, and one day it will drift beyond my sight.
My writing here forms another example. Each idea or observation I write down moves outward like a ripple from a stone dropped in still water. Some ripples weaken quickly and vanish as distance grows from the initial perturbation. Other of my ripples cross paths with ripples started elsewhere and produce new patterns through interference in the brains of people I’ll never meet.
A smaller number may strengthen when surrounding conditions line up: when an idea meets receptive minds or aligns with events already in motion. I have no reliable way to track the final shape any of this takes. Has any portion of it improved the world in any way? I cannot measure that from inside.
What I can control is the attempt to keep what I write aligned with observable reality as closely as possible. The results are not always Beautiful. They are not always Good. They simply aim to stay as True as I can make them. When I’m lucky, they’re two of the three. When I’m very lucky, they’re all three.
Stepping back gives me yet another perspective. A single human life occupies almost no space against the age of the Universe. The cosmos we can observe remains young even by its own standards. Some red dwarfs carry enough fuel supplies to keep them burning for trillions of years, which is slightly longer than The Simpsons has been on TV. Distant descendants, if any exist at that scale, might live under skies lit by those dim red suns and occasionally consider their own origins.
Far more likely, the timescales involved would have erased any specific memory of earlier generations. The thread of continuity will be stretched to the utmost at that great depth of time and only the most basic, the greatest of what is Beautiful, Good and True will remain.
Yet, I keep starting these projects. I keep choosing to begin work whose completion sits beyond my time on Earth. I try to retell stories that are older than any living man, stories of our history, of self-reliance, of bravery, of what is best in being human. The way I tell those stories is imperfect and incomplete, but it’s just another tree planted without expectation of sitting under the finished shade.
Perhaps, at some vastly later point, whatever remains of humanity will retain at least a trace of humor about the whole arrangement and maybe a ripple from this time will impact them. That possibility, however small, supplies its own quiet justification for continuing to drop stones into the water. Besides, farting is intrinsically funny, and if my fart joke survives a trillion years, well, that really would be a blast from the past."
No comments:
Post a Comment