A Wrinkle in Time
When I was in the fourth grade, Madeleine L’Engle captured my imagination with her children’s book A Wrinkle in Time .
I couldn’t tell you what it is about, but I do remember how it made me feel — as if time itself were bendable, relative, not really linear as we believe it to be. Listening to stories such as hers helped build my writer’s mind, allowing me to create stories that only existed once I told them. Characters came to life. Ideas were born and situations formed – in black and white.
Eons later I explored the meaning of time for us all and came to discover that how we treat time says a lot about how we live our lives. Time became the protagonist in the stories I told. As fictitious as the characters in Ms. L’Engle’s books, I learned that time itself does not exist but in the minds that behold it.
Yet time, this made-up character in the story of our lives, leaves traces everywhere. It burrows lines in our faces. It frames life events. Based on mutual agreement of the clock, time gets us to where we are going – whether by train, plane or automobile.
Time gives our lives meaning, as meaningless as time itself is. We live our lives as if it is real. But like the figures in children’s book, time is no more real than the Easter Bunny.
If that is true, then only this moment is real. Past and future are but interpretations of what may or may not have happened. Most of it is our story anyway.
We are the authors of our lives. It would serve us well to write a good story — with heroes and heroines and adventures that take us places and allow us, if only for a moment, to dance with ebullience on that wrinkle we call time.
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