Consider, thou, the river

This morning, I was trying to come up with controversial factual statements -- statements whose exact truth could be and is debated by persons of good will -- and I stumbled across the fact that some physicists have discovered a hypothesis of "entanglement in time" at a quantum level. By the way, hypothetical and quantum are the best sorts of entanglements in time. Although the author suggests that this leads to time travel, it would be of subatomic particles, and so it would mean that muons are coming from the past or going back, and we goliaths of molecules are not harmed or benefited in any way.

I've said before how synchronicity has always, even before I read Jung at fifteen, worked for me. I needed no convincing of convergence, because I think the microcosm/macrocosm thing is just fine.

Also this morning, before I sought topics, my best friend treed a cat. She's thirteen years old, nearly fourteen, losing her teeth, arthritic, and still very dainty. All of her life, she has been the aloof and imperious one with her surroundings, fond with me. Her usual habit with cats is to cock an eyebrow at them and to treat them, like most things, as beneath her contempt. Now, though, that she has past her middle ages, I am glad that she got the primal joy of chasing a cat up a tree. She did seem embarrassingly pleased with herself.

As she did that, I thought over the length of my life and whether I had done or been or gotten anything that had been promised or sought. For a day or morning, at least, I could look not at the span. I could say that there is no such thing as this river. There have been segments, only. There have been rapids and swells, deep portions, stagnant pollution, and great agitation, and there will be a petering out in a torpid or tormented run at some point to come, but these things are neither here nor there. Each section is a section, accountable to its own judgment and frustrating any whole.

Did I go somewhere? There is no where to go. Did I achieve something? There are no things to achieve. Is death supposed to be a yardstick? Why? Surely it's no evil thing, if it occurs to every thing that has ever been.

This, you see, is quite pleasant, in the end. Each bend of the river is a river all its own. It begins when the last horizon is obscured and ends when the next comes into view. The very idea that we must look at birth to death and assume that these are appointed and meaningful measures, that there is an opening bell and a finishing tape, is absurd. I'm alright just now. I don't think I will be pretty soon, but right now it's a nice morning, nice afternoon, and with a fresh shave, a good friend (who bravely frightened a cat), and gasoline, it's enough. It's far more than enough.