There are moments when the past crashes into the present and the two become virtually indistinguishable. This happens to me a lot when I’m thinking about my high school years. That was almost twenty years ago, but at times I sit back and think, “It seemed like high school was just yesterday.”
I know this feeling isn’t unique. Everyone experiences it: The college graduate feels like he was entering first grade just yesterday; the retiring man feels like he was starting his first day on the job just a week earlier; the octogenarian mourning the loss of his spouse feels like he was marrying his bride a few days ago. Every person intuitively collapses time into a few days, crushing the distinction between days, weeks, months, and years.
It may be common, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bizarre. We’re dealing with time, and time, in its mechanics, is easy to understand: There are sixty minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, ten years in a decade. It’s a logical sequence of before and after; there’s no mystery to it.
But the logical sequence doesn’t always control our thoughts. There’s something about us that seems to override that logic. I’ve never seen an explanation for it, and I don’t have an explanation, but I’ve stumbled across something that seems to make sense: It’s the soul’s fault.
When we deal with days and years, we’re dealing with time, and time is the measure of the worldly order: It measures before and after in the world’s ongoing march. Material things exist in time. Spiritual things like the soul, on the other hand, exist outside the worldly order and therefore exist outside of time. They exist in a duration known as eviternity. It’s a duration, St. Thomas Aquinas said, that is analogous to eternity.
Eternity, in a way, seems to resemble that haunting feeling that crunches decades into days. Eternity, for instance, doesn’t know duration. It makes no distinction between yesterday and tomorrow, hours and days. It contains no before or after; it is a simultaneous whole. Likewise, St. Thomas said, “Eviternity [has] a beginning but no end”; “[An eviternal thing’s] measure does not contain before and after”; “Eviternity is simultaneously whole.”
Our souls are spiritual creatures and therefore exist in a duration that does not contain before and after. They exist in a duration that is simultaneously whole. Maybe this causes our tendency to crush distinctions in time. Though our rational faculty knows distinctions in time, our spirituality overlooks them, and, in a sense, overrides the rational.
The resulting feeling that years ago were just yesterday highlights the weakness of existing in time. It points to the passing of time and to our impending departure from that which time measures. The feeling is understandably sobering and saddening, though time marks our passing existence in the merely worldly, the world is a wonderful creation and our time in it a blessing.
But if I’m right, the feeling ought also to point to greater things. When we feel that years ago were just yesterday, our feelings are merely submitting to the soul’s greatest functioning — that of a spiritual agent, an agent which can, and is supposed to, communicate with the Creator of time. And communicate with Him in eternity.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
