The Overwhelming Past & Overrated Present

I've been delinquent, lately, in my blogging duties. And here's why: I was time traveling. Specifically, I was jumping around between 1880 and the present in central Nebraska. I was there with my father and eldest son doing some long-delayed genealogical research. My father's mother, you see, was born in 1885 on a homestead near the now essentially extinct town of O'Connor in Greeley County. We ventured there looking for the past and found plenty of it, naturally. The past is like that: Lying all over the place, mostly broken. Or so I assumed.

Then, as I was driving along a road here at home in Albuquerque the other day, I started to question the way I had been thinking about the past and about time. I'd been assuming the past was sort of a deep well: A very real thing that forms the foundation of the present, but less and less accessible the deeper you look. Next I got to thinking how easy it is for folks to just ignore the past entirely. I mean let's face it: The past is gone, right? Why worry about it when all we have is the present?

That's when the geologist in my head barged into the conversation. The past is not gone, he growled. It lives

in the present in all sorts of ways. One way is in the very structure of the landscapes we live in -- all carved from geological forces that have been underway for billions of years. Another is in the long-forgotten efforts of the craftsmen who raised the walls that shelter us. One more is the genetic histories we (and our food plants and animals) inherit -- also products of billions of years of evolution. Finally, the past is in the personal and family histories that, like it or not, serve as the software for our genetic hardware and complete the construction of who we are right now.

To those who say there is really nothing but the present, I agree. But what is the present but a microscopically thin veneer living on the surface of past? So to look only at the present without seeing the past would be like staring at the cells of the living cambium beneath the bark of a giant redwood tree, while totally missing the majesty, beauty and the magnificent history of the tree itself.

Finally, as I neared my home in my crotchety 41-year-old pick-up truck, I thought: There probably ought to be a law against this sort of thinking while driving.