| Due Time (May 23, 2003) The beating of your heart, like the turning of the globe, is out of your control. Both will cease to move at some future point in time. The color of the sky, the lifespan of the sun�like the breaths you have remaining�cannot be undone. There is, and there is not; nothing else is true. The present is just a line between what was and what will be. You are thoughts and actions, matter that will someday conspire to send forth shoots into a world that no longer knows you, part of a universe that has never known or cared that you came and went. And yet, we hope. We dream and wish, we plead and pray. Our reason has outdone us, still we rise from sleep each day. We seek out beauty, we pine for love, we search for meaning, direction, purpose in a maze of chemical symbols and a litany of algebraic equations. There is order, but it is unresponsive to the whims of a sole earthbound species that thinks itself master of the cosmos, a space where billions of globes turn and billions of suns shine, and like the beating of billions of hearts, each will stop in due time. |