THE WHEEL OF LIFE

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The city’s name was Manus. It existed in the late 1800s up to around 1915, and though it only had a population of just over 40,000 people, it had an electrical grid of a city that could serve over a million and it was located on the Amazon River in the midst of Brazil’s massive rain forest. Manus boasted buildings considered the most beautiful ever built in any country, with an opera house second to none in the world.

How did this amazing city on the Amazon River grow and thrive in the deep rain forests of Brazil? One word...RUBBER. The world, almost over night, had almost voracious need for rubber to make tires for the burgeoning car industry and the rubber trees in the Amazon rain forest had the greatest concentration of rubber producing trees in the world.

Today, Manus is gone. Reclaimed by the jungle to the point that, if you went there you would literally see nothing but jungle—the reason, the invention of synthetic rubber. Rubber produced by trees was no longer needed and with it, Manus was no longer needed. The Wheel of Life turned and within a generation after the bust, the streets and buildings began to disappear beneath the overgrowth and within a few short years it was gone without a trace.

My point is not so much a history lesson as it is an observation. Not of buildings or cities but how the passage of time can be an illusion, like watching the hands of a clock that don’t seem to move, yet look away for just a few moments, and then look back--the hands have moved and the wheel of life has slipped by without you noticing.

Where once time seemed to plod along at a slow pace, today it passes in a blur like seeing the world from the window of a speeding car. We are inundated by literal dumps of information: internet, social media, a million cell phones recording a million events that show up, no longer on the evening news or newspaper, but on a screen in your pocket or on your wrist. And life becomes like Facebook. You see something one day only to see it disappear the next, pushed out of site by twenty other people posting at the same time.

A few weeks ago while getting a haircut, I mentioned to the girl cutting my hair that I had relocated from California where I worked with Doc Severinsen and Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. She had no idea who Doc Severinsen or even who Johnny Carson was. Had no idea who the Beatles were. Who Ronald Reagen was. Everything, for the most part, before her birth, didn’t exist for her. Pushed out of existence like posts on Facebook. Erased from existence like the City Manus in the Amazon jungle.

And she is not alone, I realized I am not really much different. Even though I may know about life that existed before my birth, I really don’t. Not really. I can read or watch documentaries, but I really don’t know the experience of it. Someone once told me that talking to people who have “lived” what we only read about, is to look through the window of life and experience what they experienced in a totally different way, and I know this to be true.

Several years ago I attended a breakfast and the speaker talked about “life” and “legacy” and the all inclusive “hyphen”. Yes I said “HYPHEN”. Imagine if there was a single mark or character that can encompass you entire life. It actually exists. I know you have seen it on gravestones. It is the hyphen between the day that you are born and the day you die... and that single hyphen represents everything that has happened in between: all the graduations; and weddings; and funerals; first kisses and first dates; the times of joy and happiness; and the days of sorrow and despair, all the moments that contain and define and crystallize what we refer to as our lives. And like Manus, that lost city in the Amazon, everything that the hyphen represents begins to lose it’s humanity, fading in time and memory, until one day, it becomes nothing more than a hyphen on a grave stone.

My point in writing this is not to be depressing, but rather the opposite--maybe even encouraging. How many times have we spent our “hyphens” concerned about what other people think? How many times have we lived our lives in the shadows of others when we could have walked in the shadow of angels? If you add up all the times we fail to live, to exercise the single greatest “forgiveness” of all--”forgiving yourself”, of choosing to be happy, which, in itself is an act of courage; you begin to realize that the true value of any hyphen is not what it means to others...but what it means to you.

They say “you can’t take it with you,” but I believe you can... and you do. Maybe not the material things we accumulate in this life, but things of the spirit, a hyphen defined by the sculptor’s tool of life, prepared and ready to experience the next great adventure. Time will reclaim all our hyphens, the dates they separate, and even the stone they are written on, but all that we have become on the wheel of life,---that we take that with us when we leave, long after the hyphen on our grave stone, becomes just a mark between two dates. Otherwise, what would be the purpose of living?

 

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Kim Michael– “IN SEARCH OF WONDER”.

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