When the Cogs Align, or, Synchronicity 2

For this week’s blog, I really didn’t have anything of importance to discuss. The only thing I can think of is the discussion I had last week, time and moving on, all wrapped up in trying to finish this paper. I was thinking about Thoreau’s quote, “We loiter in winter when it is already spring,” and thought “When did it become Thanksgiving?” This semester, more than any I think I’ve been through, has breezed by unbelievably fast. Where did the time go?

One minute, I’m anxiously awaiting my first day of teaching classes, the next, I’m getting ready for the First Year Celebration. What just happened? I’ve also been thinking back to one of my first discussions in the blogs, about the passage of time. It seems that the idea of “time,” in all its manifestations, has been following me around.

For instance, on the extreme nerdy side of things, I’ve been re-reading the graphic novel Watchmen in preparation for what surely will be a poor movie adaptation (I’m a little jaded when it comes to movie adaptations of my favorite comics, especially since League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). One of the chapters discusses Dr. Manhattan, a character who sees all aspects of time, past, present, and future, in a continuum, like seeing all sides of a diamond at once. The chapter makes good use of the “watchmaker theory,” the idea that since life has an inherent structure to it, but is full of mistakes, catastrophes, and coincidences, God was a “watchmaker” who made the watch, then left it to its own devices. It’s a philosophically and symbolically loaded chapter, and one that touches on the bombing of Hiroshima, which was immortalized in a Time magazine cover of a watch frozen at the time of the bombing, as well as the theme of the book, which is essentially: how do you draw the line, in a hypothetical world where superheroes exist, between what is being done for the good of the people, and what is playing God? Heady stuff, but it sticks with you long after you finish it.

But back to my discussion of time, along with our discussion on the faultiness of memory: how do you, as a writer and a human being, make sense of events in your life, and separate the facts from the fiction we create in our heads? In other words, how do you tell your own narrative? We essentially take loosely related events, or unrelated events, and place some sort of order on them when we remember them anyways. Is it really that ordered? Are the cogs in the watch ever aligned? As for me, I’d like to think some things happen for a reason, and there is an order to what’s going on. Sometimes, though, I forget that.