by Old Man Moses
We are voyagers in a cosmic bottle hurtling through a mysterious, beautiful and haunting universe. We live lives historically rooted within memory, interrelated in countless ways with our fellow creatures, and transcendent in our yearning for love.
Yet, we are creatures of finitude. Death stalks us. Of our origins we know little. Our destiny is uncertain. Memory reaches back no further than the womb. Hope reaches beyond the grave, but certainty is of this life alone.
We are creatures locked in paradox. There are limits beyond which human understanding cannot reach. We have defined matter into particles so small they elude either detection or measurement. Yet, when divided, they create energy potentially so devastating as to threaten the very civilization that only recently imagined their existence. Yet, the question of their origin is no less baffling than the question of our own.
Time and space present problems of equal magnitude. These two factors that so clearly define human understanding themselves remain a mystery beyond understanding.
The period of man’s recorded history is so brief in relation to what scientists have deduced about the longevity of the universe that one might compare it to a blink of an eye in a lifetime. The distance from the Earth to the sun (93 million miles) is itself so “itsy bitsy teeny weeny” (LOL) in relation to what scientists have deduced to be the distance from Earth to the nearest star.
About time and space, our perceptions are such that we can only postulate an eternal before and an unending beyond. We cannot imagine any point in time about which we could not ask: “What came before?” Nor can we imagine any point in space about which we could not ask: “What lies beyond?”
Thus we derive our notion of the infinite. A universe in which at some point in time there was no before and no beyond would be a universe so radically different from the one we are accustomed to experiencing as to be meaningless.
The nature of our predicament is akin to that of a fly in a bottle. The fly’s existence is defined by the contours of the bottle no less than our lives are defined by the contours of time and space. The fly can experience the limits of the bottle but cannot get out of the bottle. (Unless, of course, someone releases the cork.)
While our perceptual logic leads us to notions of eternity and infinity, experience provides us with notions of a different sort altogether. Trapped in a life made dear to us by its apparent finitude, and mysterious by the unknowability of its origins, it is difficult to accept that what is always was and always shall be.
The paradox of our understanding (or lack thereof) may be simply stated: We can no more accept a universe without origins than we can accept time without eternity or space without infinity. And there is no middle ground.
Someday, I hope, God will uncork this bottle so we can all get a better notion of what is going on here.
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Some of you may suspect I drank too much out of the bottle before I got stuck in it.
Old Man Moses, aka Bob Moses, is the first member of the blog collective to share a post. He has a long and distinguished history as a journalist and owner/editor of the Senior Edition, a unique, in-depth publication addressing issues about the challenges of elders. Bob would write editorials under the moniker of Old Man Moses, even as a young guy with an elder spirit. We are happy to have him join the voices on this blog!
The Tao of Aging 
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