Grace Alpert
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Flood of Memory
My father’s old shoes hold so many memories. This may sound strange for someone to say about a pair of beaten up, and probably quite smelly black sneakers.
However, those shoes have seen it all. They went camping with my family and I back when I was in elementary school. They have taken countless steps on various terrain all over the country. Those sneakers even came aboard our boat and went fishing with my father and me. It was there while we cast our lines into the choppy water and laughed when my dad’s hat flew off his head with a gust of wind. I hold these seemingly simple moments dearest in my heart.
As humans, I feel as if we don’t take much time at all to think. To reflect. To analyze and process each moment as it enters and exits. It’s really fascinating how fleeting each moment is. As soon as any given moment presents itself, it's instantaneously gone. Like the blink of an eye or an inhalation. Time is such a perplexing idea.
And that’s all it really is – an idea. Time is a concept fabricated by our own people, which is both terrifying and riveting. Without time, our species would cease to exist. Or would it? In this given era, time is the foundation to most - if not all - human endeavors. We say what time we want to meet our friends for lunch, or what time our sons basketball game starts. Well, what if time didn't exist? How would we conduct our lives then? Would we construct a new way to conduct our lives?
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I can feel my mind running rampant, as all these memories and thought come flooding in. Thinking about my father’s worn out shoes has brought me on an exploration of my mind. One thought leads to another, and all of a sudden, I’ve gone from shoes to the mystery of time.
The mind is truly a wondrous place.