Time (Reflections in a Pool)

I was thinking about yesterday, as I made way through the city, the first waves of madness lapping against my mind. Today, sanity, dull and chaste, prevails, and my memories attack. They have no power over me when insanity reigns, but on most days they have an iron grip on my psyche. I prefer not to remember, aside from the lyrics of a song I might want to sing, but sometimes the memories come unbidden, like old friends long outgrown, who show up unannounced at my doorstep. Funny how one memory can lead to another, when suddenly a creative spark is lit. The power of imagination is my only shield in this world. Some would say that time is a dimension, but I say that is wrong. Time is a force, as I wrote in a short poem (years ago? last week?), as much as gravity is. It is inescapable, and assaults us with persistence, even when we are unaware of it passing. It is a wave on which we ride, leaving its mark on us as it does on the mountains and the sea. We never feel that difference from day to day, then we look back to see that the idealistic youth in our mind has become a cynical adult, believing in nothing, which is a good thing since there is nothing to believe in. As I wrote in a song of mine I don't believe a thing. Something is true, or it isn't, and your thoughts on the matter in question don't affect the underying reality one way or another. People say they believe in God, but I don't; I know there's a God, and if I were some over-intellectualized atheist, it wouldn't change the reality of God's existence one way or another. Whatever faith I have comes not from belief, but in a calcultion of all the factors that I perceive. And if I'm wrong, it only means that there are some factors to the equation that I have not considered. From this philosophy grows. Time steadily flows along through the physical world, revealing glimpses of things not yet considered, like a mighty river taking all in its path to destinations unknown. Will we merge into the ocean? Will we be stranded on a sandbar? That can't be known, but we have no choice but to go along for the ride, and all our civilized pretensions will have no bearing on the final answer. I should stop there, because that sounds profound, but I am compelled to go on, much as a hiker trudges along the path, even though he might be at a beautiful spot. Night has yet to fall, and there could be some new wonder over the next hill, down in a secluded valley. One should always keep moving. That way time can only hit us with glancing blows. It's when one decides that all is well and nothing could get better, that time does the most damage. For truly, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Civilizations of the past that decide they had found perfection were soon overtaken by more inquisitive systems, as seen by the fall of Chinese imperial dynasties to the next wave of barbarians. In our accursed era, we are threatened more by our own hubris and a vain hope of attaining perfection than by anything else. If you let people be, they will eventually figure out the important stuff, but if you try to enforce a perfect order on them, they will be screwed, just as the rulers of Islam decided they were perfect and left their people at the mercy of the savage Europeans. I hope America doesn't go that way, but it seems to me that it has, and therefore, our country will lose its vibrancy to a dull equity, and when the tides of time turn against us, we shall be defenseless. Soon, night will fall.