OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

You know, most of us live in houses/apartments/condos/etc. located in suburbs/cities/towns/etc. We are well-fed, wear nice clothes, have comfortable places to live, and are healthier than any other people in history. We have so much stuff we have to hire buildings just to store the parts we don't use.

Yet we complain. It's a human condition to want more than we have, to complain about minor problems ad nauseum. We would rather look at the empty space than all the stuff around it which creates the emptiness. We have a great affluence, but we don't appreciate it.

And one of the affluence we have, one that we appreciate least, is the affluence of time. It has seldom been a person or society with or time when there was such an affluence of time, when there was time to worry about politics or world opinion or philosophical concepts. So what does this say about our attitude toward others, toward the world. And how real is that attitude?

OK, so I was watching the movie "Timeline" this morning and several lines in the movie got me to thinking. This is the story about some archaeologists who go back in time to about 1350. One of them is in love with the past, lamenting the death of the "romance" of those ages, the beauty of life which had disappeared. My immediate thought (and the movie proved me right) was that the past was not "romantic", nor beautiful. It was cruel, nasty, uncaring and very, very real.

In those days a man did not sit down to discuss your political affiliation and why you should change it to be more like his. He simply chopped your head off and considered the problem solved. As a matter of fact, he didn't even bother to find out if your politics differed from his. Anyway, the French and the English fought a hundred-year war over nothing more serious than the fact that one group was French and the other English.

Today, many of our ways of dealing with other people come about because we have this affluence of time. What the modern-day people who traveled back in time found out, however, was that when that affluence was taken away, when they had someone with a sword not taking the time to ask who they were, whose side they were on or if they wanted to parlay, they responded in a much more real way - they killed before they could be killed. And they didn't sit around regretting it or discussing the philosophical or societal aspects.

When we look at our life, most of it is spent on "real" things - going to work, raising children, meeting with friends, etc. We compartmentize our life and one compartment is for what I call "unreal" things, those things not involved in actual survival, which are much more mental than physical or emotional. Still, for us in modern society, even these "real" things are isolated from the "reality" that has been the world for most of history.

For example, we try to make sure we have a good diet (or rather, the doctors say we should), get some exercise (ditto), don't smoke, avoid stress, etc. And we consider this attending to the "reality" of maintaining good health. In truth, we have too much to eat so we have to restrict ourselves, we don't get the amount of exercise we should in everyday life so we have to build machines and buildings used just to get what we should have gotten in just living. So, you see, our lives really are quite isolated from "reality" even when we're dealing with the "real" things in our lives.

Divorce is rampant in today's society and the physical and emotional aspects of it is very "real". Yet divorce did not used to be so common. What is different today? Ask someone of the older generations (and you've got to go back to someone at least 80 is find some of them) and they'll tell you that it wasn't that people just stayed together because it was convenient, or financially necessary, etc. It was instead, because they just didn't let the minor things drive them away from the person they loved. And for them many of what we consider major things were very minor. In truth, most divorces today are brought about by boredom, by one of the partners deciding that someone else can provide the excitement they seek. Too much affluence of time, you see.

At another point in the movie someone said, "You do have a backup plan, don't you?" And in today's world we try to have backups for the backups, we need assurance that no rocks are going to be thrown in our path to happiness. But if you've ever sat in an empty apartment, having a heart attack, wondering if the ambulance will get there in time, you begin to realize that even backups may not be enough, or may not exist if you're too weak to make that 911 call. Of course, these are thoughts which come to you later, because at the time of the attack there isn't enough affluence of time for such thoughts. About the only thoughts you have time for are ones like: "Please, God, don't let me die."

So life, real life, that thing which to a large extent we try to keep at bay, has few backups, few lifeguards. Have you ever seen a film of sperm trying to find the egg? Notice how some of them are going the wrong direction, are caught in cracks and crevices, are going around in circles, are being bounced all around. That's sort of my vision of mankind going through life. Some make it, some don't, and if you are too inattentive, you'll be one of those who don't.

The final point was when the time-travelers are captured and say, "We have 650 years of knowledge that these people don't, surely we can outwit them and get out of here." You know, we do count on our modern devices and knowledge to save us from the realities of life and we are usually surprised when it doesn't. In "Final Destination" a person is rather forcefully hit by a bus. That's life. I don't mean that life is getting hit by a bus, life IS the bus and it can cream you if you aren't aware. As a comedian once said, "I tried to jump on the bandwagon and it ran over me."

Anyway, this started out as a post about how we in our modern society have so much time on our hands that we can worry about philosophical differences, political differences, esoteric points of views. People have always had differences, and those in the past didn't necessarily make any more sense than ours do. But today we have a lot more time to make these differences important, to argue about them, to reinforce them. And I think that's why people have so much more trouble in relating today, they spend too much time worrying about relating instead of taking the time to relate.

My son is in love, with a woman he's never met. He even came to my wife and me to ask what true love was (now there's a startling question for you to get from your child, even at 37), and after consideration of our answer, apparently decided that what he had fit the definition. Now, being honest, I could come up with all kinds of objections, advice and suggesions, but it's his life and I can't apply my logic to his emotions. He'll just have to experience his life the way I experienced mine.

Now, it could be that this relationship will seriously affect my life and then I will suddenly get concerned. His last wife wasn't really comfortable with us, maybe no daughters-in-law can be, but we can hope. At this point I don't know her, don't know what relationship WE might have or how her relationship with my son will affect my life, and despite the fact that he's my son, it is my life that I'm most concerned with.

I'll just hope for my son's happiness with her to continue and hope that we all can avoid stepping in front of the bus of life and reality.