Sunday Night With John: Time Is Not On Our Side
/“Fry, how did this yogurt get in your locker?”
“You see it was milk, and well time makes fools of us all” Fry answered.
This exchange in one of my favorite TV shows, Futurama, gets a laugh out of me every time I hear it. It makes me chuckle because of the pure truth revealed in the punch line. From my 3rd grade Villana Ice Spiked hair cut, to my asshole years in high school, again with spiked red hair (I didn’t learn), to my quitting college for a week. In the moment they all seemed like the correct choices and in the moment I felt like they absolutely had to be done. I thought I had fresh milk, but time revealed that it would spoil. Time after all is the great equalizer. As it marches forward it reveals that our past decisions and actions affect our future relationships. It can be evident in the way we treated people, the choices we made, and the social stances we took. At 33, I am starting to be able to look back and see how time has affected me past choices and how I can use it to my advantage in my future choices.
The skill or ability to understand that the choice you are making will reverberate through time is a tough concept to understand. It means having the ability to question your motives and to not proclaim to know in this very instance what is the best course of action. It means respect the process, think about the problem from numerous social, personal, relationship, and moral angles. And when you do make a choice, be aware that you might be making the wrong one.
We don’t always want to participate in this process and we often jump to conclusions, make infatic statements and rash decisions because we are so in the moment. Facebook and other forms of social media have aided us in our rash declarations without always thinking through the process, because who doesn’t want a few “likes” or retweets?
Are you brave enough to question your beliefs and social stances through the sands of time? Do you think the way you are acting will hold up a year from now, a 100 years from now, or 1,000 years from now? Will future cilivazations look back and say, I can’t believe people defended the Confederate flag being flown over a government building in 2015. Don’t they know that flag was created to defend slavery? More importantly, in the back nine of your life when your grandchild asks about the social problems in your time, will you answer: tastes like great cold refreshing milk? Or will you be attempting to choke down smelly, chunky, spoiled milk? As I move forward I constantly check my choices against that spoiled milk smell. Maybe it’s because I have moments in my life that I have already looked back on and had to choke on my past choices. Whatever choice, decision, and social dilemma you find yourself battling, respect time and think about how your choice will affect you and your world over time, because time is still undefeated and it has no problem making you look foolish.