Only Time Will Tell

The ultimate currency is time. Time is money. Time heals all wounds. It’s about time. It, whatever it is, is about time.

This time things are going to be different. Next time things are going to be different. But are they? How could they? How can they? For things to be different we have to be different.

A superstorm named Sandy has flattened so many lives in so short a time on a stretch of land from Cape May through Montauk Point. This circumstance gives us all an opportunity to be different, to be better, to help each other be better the next time. We can be different over both the short-term and the long-term. We can better prepare for the next storm and we can lend a helping hand up for those whose lives have gotten flattened.

The ultimate currency is time. Time immemorial. Time untold. The time of our lives. That time is life. Is there more to life than just living. One can respire, breath, and yet not live.

My mother gave me life – twice. My mother saved my life when I was three years old. I would have bled to death from a freak accident but she hugged towels to my belly wound to control the bleeding. Both she and I were spared. I have struggled for a long time why we were spared.

Unlike so many people dealing with Superstorm Sandy, especially one mother on Staten Island who wasn’t spared from the most tragic of tragedies. Our hearts go out to her for losing two sons to a superstorm tidal surge as she was doing her best to protect them. Could nature be that cruel? Could pain ever be worse? We feel this pain as a people and as a community. It invades every level of our existence - right to the depth of our souls. While we can’t share her grief, we do grieve along with her.

For we don’t get to pick. We don’t get to choose. We are given life and then after the expense of a certain amount of time, that life is taken away. The inevitable is the inevitable. You can’t conquer time. Or can you? I believe that our lives continue after our time runs out.

I do indeed believe this is, but this is not blind faith. You see while my mother was hugging my three-year-old body to keep the life from spilling out an adult version of me was watching from a chair at the dining room table. After a brief period of time a hand was placed on my shoulder and I was told it was time to go back. The part of my life that would be contained in my body was being given more time. I don’t know by whom and I don’t know for how long. And I have been searching for decades to try and find out why.

Perhaps the search for why is what this part of life is all about.

The conjunction of a few days between the dozens and dozens of tragic, horrible stories from Superstorm Sandy to the peaceful passing of my life giver, my mother, has brought renewed and intensified energy to my search for why I was chosen for more time and so many others were not. I feel that energy coursing through my body, my mind, my heart, and my soul. And oddly I am reminded of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – E=mC2 > energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

Or, a physical body moving extremely fast is actually energy.

Our energy has an existence beyond our physical selves. Our hearts, minds, and souls have energy that exists beyond our bodies. No matter whether that energy leaves our body while we sleep in our 85th year or from a tidal tragedy while still a toddler that energy still lives – even if its body has used up its allotted time.