Heart of the Past, Eyes of the Future
We humans are just vessels and as my ship is returning to shore, hers is just being fueled, ready for an exploration that I’ll not be a part of fully, nor is it possible that I could even if the dream of immortality was bestowed upon us. It isn’t just the limits of our technology that is expanding, it is the limits of our capacity to understand life and the universe that surrounds us. Like us and our parents before them, each generation is built to explore further. Not just into the wonder that is ourselves, but into the vastness of this existence in which we reside.
I am an age gone by. She is an age that is becoming. Both incredibly sad and overwhelmingly joyous at the same time. It is the nature of parenthood and always shall be. It’s inevitable that we become products of the world in which we inhabit, for we are limited by the information available, the collective thought of possibility, save for a few great thinkers and geniuses who are given a sneak peak at what lies beyond the wizard’s veil. It’s a journey that we, as parents, will never see completed.
I suppose that could be viewed as sad in a selfish and myopic way. But, it was never about us, this journey.
We travel side by side for a while, but inevitably, the distance between our ships grows as the years pass. It’s become so with my older ones, their ships well over the horizon now. The younger one is firmly within my wake still, drifting along until she finds her legs and then she’ll unknowingly to her, begin to chart a path that cannot help but take her far, far away from me.
In time, the communications grow faint and distorted with distance. Fewer they arrive and more sporadic they become, until one day………one day……my ship will run out of fuel and theirs will continue on to destinations I cannot know. Again, it could be seen as sad.
Such, however, is the hope and joy of parenthood. We mold these vessels and pack them with the essentials that we’ve needed, encoded them with the information that allowed us to survive and even thrive in this sometimes hostile existence. From time immemorial when we emerged from caves until now, when we are touching the edges of our galaxy we have all been blessed enough to fulfill this basic yet immensely important task.
As I’ve aged, it’s a realization that has hit me very hard indeed. Not only am I passing down ideas and information, I am with each quiet breath, each guiding step, passing on a little of my cargo so that it might reach a place that I am never going to be able to go. My hold is packed with experience and a live lived, hers empty and ready to be filled with whatever might come. While it’s heartbreaking to know that one day, they’ll be on this journey alone, it is an immense blessing to realize that I am a part of it at all. Bittersweet, that is the essence of life. Take a little, but give a little back.
But we, as parents, departed our shores many, many years ago. Some of their vessels ran out of fuel and we’ve been traveling our charted course for years now. Not alone, but no longer in time with theirs. Just as the age of sail gave way to the age of steam our limitations were lessened and we went further, faster but, alas, always we are ruled by that fuel, time, that inevitably runs out.
We are not immortal, but pieces of us will continue upon their journey. Threads of who we are tied to them as they take their journey into the unknown, just as we grasp the threads of our parents who are completing, or have finished their journeys, woven together for eternity. One arm grasping those gossamer tendrils tied our parents before us, one hand holding tenuously to the ever thinning moorings of our children.
In a father’s hearts we carry the past, but in the eyes of our children we can glimpse the future. In her little face I see the great distances I will never traverse, and the possibilities of all that will be. Her eyes are the windows through which I may view an existence that I will never be a part of. Her world is beyond mine, in time and technology, but with that bright smile and wondrous eyes I can see a place far distant from mine. Wow.
No, I’ll never see the shore upon which she lands, but I get glimpses through her and my other children and that’s a blessing beyond measure. I’ll allow them to wrap me a little tighter around their fingers because it’s those threads that will bind us through eternity. In time those threads will be thin, wispy tendrils so thin one might not be able to see them.
But oh my, they can be felt.
