Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past. ---Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, Minnesota's great poet/songwriter/performer, turns 83 today...he is a part of that cluster of famous musicians born in the early 1940: he's 15 years older than me. So for 15 years of his life I wasn't alive...should I be despondent over my death, or non-existence, during that period? After I die...whenever that happens...should he likewise be despondent should he outlive me? You see, I'm taking a little of ol' Bob's above quote and working with it, for I think we two just might have overlapping views about the passage of time and the concepts of past, future, and the now. Not that the "The Bard" was referring to any of this with his quote, other than emphasizing that both future and past are indistinct and essentially unreal while only the now, the very moment we are currently both living through, is truly all that is real. It's indeed a great mystery, not any less than what happens after death from our own perspective, about what we were before we existed in the first place. Yet unless you believe in reincarnation, and that would only be a conjecture on your part, time itself seems to be an illusion, a construct that living organisms have used to perpetuate themselves...
