The way that time passes is a funny thing, isn’t it? And equally mysterious whether in small or large increments, how we can sit still but time can still move, how we can blink and be on to the next moment, the next day, the next century.
Currently, I am sitting back home on one of two air mattresses in our house, looking over what is simultaneously probably the emptiest house and the messiest place in the neighborhood. It is hard to clean up when there is nowhere to put anything; no dressers, no bookshelves, no tables and chairs.
So I pick up the few books we’ve kept with us, the ones that are Eliot’s favorites, and all the summer clothes, which are the only kind we’ve had for years, and I take a good look, I remember a time when Eliot would not go to bed without his animal book, a time when Lincoln wore his pajama pants for three days straight because I had bigger battles to fight. Because by the time we unpack the boxes again, by the time we sort out our lives with our things again, we may not need those clothes anymore, and Eliot may have found better books. He’ll be 2 before we get these things again, and by then he may have moved on. And we might be somewhere where we don’t need these clothes, except for maybe a few months in the summer.
And so many moments have gone, are going, will go. Our military lives have been measured in 3 year increments, and this last one has almost passed now, leaving us one boy and one house richer, with an infinite amount of knowledge that we did not have before: how to paddle board, how to pick poke, how to flash the shaka like a local when someone lets us go in front of them in traffic.
Looking back on these small moments, it is easy to think that the big moments have passed just as quickly. It is easy in some places to feel that the past was just here a second ago, that we just missed it. I felt this especially the morning that we headed up north to the Puako Petroglyph Park.
After a mile trail through woods and grasslands, surrounded by wild goats descended from ones introduced to the island by James Cook, we stand behind new fences looking out over old writings, carefully carved with what must have been hot and difficult labor.
It’s significant to me that all that is left of these people is their writing. In other places, old, crumbling walls remain, a few game boards, and some statues, facing out to the open sea. But here, there is only writing, lying in front of us, pictures, petroglyphs, and the way they saw the world. The only way these people tried to make their moments last and one of the ways they tried to make their moments matter.
We walk around the edges of their paper, and I wonder how their writing helped them, and I think it probably helped them in the way it has helped all writers: it gave them something of themselves outside of themselves, it gave them something to point back to, and it gave them a way to have make the truth of their existence physical. Because, first and foremost, isn’t all writing for ourselves and others afterwards? Isn’t it the way we know ourselves? It is not til afterwards, if we have done it well, that others come along and say, ‘Me too’, and ‘I see you’, and ‘I understand’.
And so we, they and I, have this in common. That we take the things around us, that we take the time out of our hot Hawaiian days, maybe when our kids are being watched by someone else, and we put our fingers on our keyboards and our stones, trying to take our lives captive, trying to find our meaning and trying to give ourselves something to remember.
And we solidify the place where we are so that we can move on.
Because these moments don’t last.
Tomorrow, there will be new stories, new places, new people, new days. And all we’ll have is what we have remembered, and sometimes all that we have remembered is what we have written down.
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