Results of Ruminations

At the eager age of 21, I married my high school sweetheart. We had known each other since we were 17, she had waited whilst I served a mission in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and was willing and happy and hoping to get married when I returned home. Because I took a two-year hiatus to my education, I was behind her in studies. She graduated a couple of semesters after we wedded, taking a job at a school in the Jordan School District while I rounded out my final year or two of coursework. She had a miscarriage in the summer of 2006, and our first born child came two days before I graduated as part of the class of 2007. Throughout the entirety of our time together as a married couple, we've both worked. In fact, I've never financially supported her. We've worked together to make sure we had enough money, and though I've occasionally earned more than she, it's always been the case that Gayle has provided for the family. Soon after the birth of our first child, I was un...

At the school where I teach, we have an annual tradition, spanning five years now, in which we have the senior class write a "Last Lecture" about their time at the school. Because I teach at a charter school that serves kids from 7th through 12th grade, some of the students who speak have spent a third of their lives in those hallways. They've accumulated a lot of experiences, taken a lot of classes, and heard me a lot, bellowing about uniform violations in those selfsame hallways. The lecture gives them a chance to reflect not only on those times, but the other tendons, fibers, and connective tissues that have built them into the young men and women they are on the cusp of becoming. This time of year is always enjoyable for me. While it can be stressful to finish all of the administrivia of being a teacher (which, I am quick to point out, is not so much as the administration has to do), this is one of my favorite times of the year. Emotionally, I've put my most imp...

So far as human minds can fathom, there is no such thing as the future. Sure, there are things in futurity. We have our calendars, our fixed dates and expectations of what will come to pass. But the future remains unattainable, always turning into now  and then sliding--consumed--into the past. I'm hardly the first person to make this consideration. Indeed, in some ways, contemplating time is one of the core purposes of philosophy . It's also beyond philosophy and into the scientific, with all sorts of possibilities (like the minuscule Planck instant ) embedded within it. People much smarter than I have burrowed into this topic and tried to share their understanding. But since my feeble brain can't necessarily follow their paths, I'll wander around in my own version of what I can comprehend.  And that's this: The entirety of a human's experience is an omnipresent now  that is somehow different than then  but not entirely independent of to come . That is, w...