Inside the Hourglass

I was chatting to someone about having a baby recently. She is thirty something, financially sound and happily married. I didn’t ask—I know better. Children are not for everyone. But she brought it up.

“I’m not sure we’ll have kids.” She was sopping up the last bit of artichoke dip, the same way I was scraping the bottom of my youth—within reason, but a bit desperately.

“I won’t bring a child into this. These are such awful times,” she concluded.

A thousand thoughts rang out in my mind. “But these are the only times you get. You have to live as if you have a future. Or you won’t.”

Everyone has something to say to young people, about young people, regarding the breakdown of society and the seemingly never ending barrage of doom. You don’t understand, I don’t understand, get uptight, relax a little, stay serious, be mindful and don’t be late to dinner.

I won’t say any of that. I don’t know that any of our current insanity will not kill us, or that a job will magically appear and remain, or a two car garage, or even a tiny house, are in your future.

What I want to say, as the student of history that I am, is that you are not alone. Every generation feels as if everything needs to be shattered in order to be rebuilt. And each invention marks the doom of everything that came before. From the printing press to the telegraph, to AI. We thought our parents were idiots. And they were, living as they were, in the times they’d been given.

Because we cannot thrive inside a history that has yet to be written, we are forced to live where we are now. Fight injustice by day, but make sure you appreciate the freedom you have left at night. Time is neither good nor bad and it doesn’t stop until things get better.

As a child I was petrified of nuclear war. Adults spoke about it non stop, they gamed it out with us at the other end. We did duck and cover drills where we scurried beneath ancient tin desks waiting for the boom. They showed us films like, The Day After that depicted the bomb’s aftermath in its gory detail, bodies incinerated in a nanosecond.

I fully expected to be bombed into oblivion, the desk as a shield notwithstanding.

I would walk down the six lane half highway outside my building and imagine a mushroom cloud spreading across the distant skyline. Was Brooklyn far enough to survive the first blast? With radiation, starvation and centuries of contamination, did I even want to?

But somehow, so far, there has been no fall out beyond Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the breakdowns in the nuclear plants. I wish I had been able to see into the future in order to reassure myself. It would have saved me sleepless hours and several cuticles.

Even in the Holocaust, in the ghettos, in the camps, they staged plays, they played music, they celebrated holidays with crumbs of bread. And in the dark tunnels of Gaza, those hostages lit makeshift candles on Chanukah. There is no future. Only now.

My own sons withstood their version of duck and cover, where they shut the lights and made the elementary aged children squat down low and keep quiet in a corner of a closet so the shooter couldn’t find them. I was there for one once. I wondered again if I wouldn’t be better off in the initial blast.

And even with that prep, my son has been adjacent to two mass shootings—one at his University and one at his office building. At 22 years old, dumb luck has saved him twice. I’m still grateful every moment that he exists.

Time’s merciless march is marked by a series of painful events, some manmade, some internal, much of which we’re powerless over. There will be births and weddings and funerals. The world will spin madly on while you wait for death.

No one guarantees you a peaceful life, or one without conflict. It could very well be that this breakdown of world order and the despots all over the planet, will mark the end. We don’t know. The fact that you are alive is all the promise you get.

You are inside the hour glass now and the sand is rushing through. Years don’t wait while presidencies peter out. Do what you can. Step in whenever you see an opening. Laugh louder than anyone, sing with the spirit of those idiots who came before us, and for goodness sakes, say yes to whatever happiness comes your way.