Passing Time

How are you?

It’s been awhile since I sat down and did this, write about things happening around here and how those things affect me or me them, and I find that I miss it, the reflection and pondering and trying to make sense of it all. That is usually what my early Sunday mornings were for, sitting quietly listening and thinking, a cup of coffee not too far away and random thoughts passing through me for consideration.

But of late I’ve been busy building the addition and haven’t taken the time I know I need for myself, the time we all need to slow life down to a more manageable pace so we can catch our collective breath and remember who we are and why we are here. I read a short piece the other morning from my email inbox, the weekly Prairie Home Companion email, that normally details the upcoming episode’s guests and location etc, but this week the show’s host and mainstay Garrison Keillor wrote a fitting tribute to his long time friend and sound effects genius, Tom Keith, who passed away suddenly this week at the age of 65 due to a heart attack.

It was the kind of piece you’d love to have written about you when your time finally comes, a matter of factly written take on the man’s professional life as known and shared with the show’s listeners – it didn’t delve into his personal or private side – and reading it you knew for certain that the man will be missed dearly.

Andy Rooney passed away this week as well, another man who will be missed; a familiar face who visited with us every week and offered up a view of his world for our entertainment and education. Pointed, caustic and witty, his opinions provoked many. Whether you agreed with his point of view or not wasn’t important so much as his point of view, expressed so obviously as only Mr. Rooney could, got you thinking.

Their passings this week got me thinking, since we all will pass along that way one day, perhaps better to think of these things while I’m still able, and not provide my family with a hurried, scrambled collection of thoughts on my deathbed – should I be so lucky to pass in that manner.

I’ve always had questions that no one ever had concrete answers for, call me a Devil’s Advocate if you wish, but I always saw a few sides to most stories, but being as stubborn as bull might not have allowed the second or third side of a story to change my mind once it was made up, but I’m a bit wiser now, perhaps, or maybe my experiences have coloured those shades of grey and those black and white absolutes with a bit more latitude.

Riddle me these:

Why are we here?
What’s our purpose?
Where are we going?
If God exists where did God come from?
If nothing lasts forever, then what does nothing eventually become? Something?
What if the colours of objects I see aren’t the way they really are? What if what I call blue is actually green to everyone else?
If energy is neither gained nor lost – where did all this energy originate in the first place, and where will it eventually end up?
Infinity doesn’t exist (Right, Buzz Lightyear?)– you can always add one more. And by that thinking there could never be a “first” anything; there had to be something before.

I could keep going. But there’s one question that I have that I know one day I will find out:
What happens when you die?

Of course that brings about a great deal of related questions: What happens to “me” when I die? Where does my “being part” go? Are we like flickering candles slowly burning down to the bottom of the wick, and then in that one very final, very last moment, a puff of smoke and we are no more? A flame extinguished of its own consummation? And does our being linger then slowly float away on the curling wisps of smoke, ever expanding?

It’s easier of course to believe in something, rather than question everything, but a life unquestioned is a pitiful excuse and squandered use of your time here. What’s your legacy going to be? What will ‘they’ say when you finally pass that way, when they stand up and say a few words about you, about how you lived, and what you did, and they kind of person they thought you were…

What do you want them to say?

Tom Keith and Andy Rooney left us this week, and both spoke nothing but the ‘truth’ as they saw (or heard it) Tom Keith entertained with an amazing ability to re-create sounds we all knew, through the use of some props but mostly with his body and unbelievable vocal skills, and Andy Rooney didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know or hadn’t thought ourselves, but he presented that truth in a manner that we will always remember.

Maybe that’s the answer to a lot of those questions I have (well, not ‘the’ answer but a compelling way to view those questions.) Maybe it’s not about why or what or when, but it all boils down to ‘how.’

How we spend our time, and how we live our lives, and how we express the ‘truths’ of our work, our beliefs, our ideas, and our creations; that’s what our legacy truly will be.

Not who we were, but how we were.

Ponder that the next time you meet somehow and they honesty ask you: “How are you?”