Why are we in a Big Hurry?

By Dan Barber

Each morning on my 8-mile commute to work there are many vehicles speeding along passing me. But it seems that when I arrive at the traffic light those speeders are setting there waiting for my arrival. Also, I’ve noticed on more than one occasion that we all arrive at work within seconds of each other. Why waste that gas and risk a possible expensive speeding ticket for just a few seconds of time.

If speed is their need, they might want to consider that all of us are speeding along on the same path and we will all reach the untimate destination eventually, some will arrive at their final destiny sooner than others… I would prefer to reach it much later in life.

I used to have that need for speed. Before I reached the age of 18 I was one of those traffic violators. I received a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles telling me that if I got one more ticket for speeding I would loose my driver’s license until I reached the age of 21… as a 17-year old kid in California and not having a license to drive was a fate worse than…death?

Well maybe it’s not that bad, but since that DMV warning, I tried to become a very responsible driver. In the 40 plus years since, I’ve only received one speeding ticket. Perhaps the older we get the slower we get. I recently asked Diane, my wife, to “hurry up,” so we could get somewhere, she replied, “I am hurrying!” That struck me as very funny because she was moving real slow… my new pet name for her now is “Slo-Mo.”

I guess the kids now are just the same as kids have always been… they want everything right now, or as I call it “instant gratification.” It seems like just yesterday when I was sitting on my grandparents front porch thinking that my life was about to be over because my Mom and Dad were moving us out of grandma and grandpa’s house in Omaha Nebraska to a new home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. But when you’re 5-years-old that 5 mile distance might just as well be as far as the moon is from the earth.

During a cross country trip once, I took my wife and children by the old neighborhoods I lived in as a child. Everything seemed really small. When I was a child and had to walk to school in the Iowa snow it seemed to take forever. Actually the school was only about two short blocks from my old house. We then drove the 5 miles across the bridge over the Missouri River to my old neighborhood in Omaha… everything there also seemed really small.

I guess when we are small and believe that we are the center of the universe, everything is bigger, better and everlasting. But when we travel at the speed of life to our eventual destination we come to learn that we are not immortal, but just a speck in the infinite universe traveling on a planet that is speeding through space along with our galaxy at nearly 830,000 miles per hour, and with the earth spinning at the equator at around 1,000 miles per hour and orbiting our sun at more than 660,000 miles per hour.

Maybe it would be a good idea to slow down and enjoy the majesty of our existence while we still have the time.

What is Rattling Around in Your Head?

By Dan Barber

I have stuff rattling around in my head constantly… I can be easily distracted which causes me to sometimes take a little longer in accomplishing assigned tasks, so I apologize to my four or five followers of my Saturday Morning Post blog for being late, or sporadic with my posting. And please forgive me if I am repeating my self, or becoming abstract in my thoughts… I am starting to do that more and more these days.

I think the older we get, the more we start thinking about the “after-life” or the hope for one. I do believe that we have an after-life, or a “forever-life”. A few years ago my father was being kept alive with medical devices. My mother, along with my siblings knew that he didn’t want to continue living like that so we decided to have the hospital turn off the equipment and let our father pass.

For a few weeks after that action I worried about my part in the decision until I dreamt that I was having a conversation with my Dad and I asked him, “If we can bring you back to life, do you want to live again?” He said no, he added “I am able to relive the joyous moments of my life all over again as if it were the first time.”  After that I was able to find peace in the knowledge that my Dad was having the, “Times of his life” in his Heaven.

Many years ago I thought it would be a good idea to write a science fiction story about some ancient alien beings that created a device to gather all knowledge that would never be lost and these alien beings would be immortal if only in memory, or “knowledge”. The title I thought about was the Gathering of Data… or the acronym G.O.D. I thought that a good way this device could use to collect the data would be to implant a soul into every living thing or being. So upon death, the information could then travel back to the creators to be downloaded into the Gathering of Data… told you I had weird stuff rattling around in my head… Now whenever I watch the “Discovery” or “History” channel on TV, some of the stuff aired rekindles some of my ideas that I once had about my story idea. One physicist, Stephen Hawking, claimed on one of these TV programs that nothing can escape a black hole, not even knowledge… I thought well there you go, the Gathering of Data!

The more I wrote my science fiction story the more I thought about the need for a conflict. I decided that to create a conflict, the Gathering of Data would download the information from the recently arrived soul and then send out the recycled and hopefully blank soul to other living beings to gather more information. Here is where the conflict starts… some of these souls, weren’t blank, they retained some memories from their previous lives or even the memory of being with the Gathering of Data… GOD!

Recently, I had another dream. This dream involved my grandmother who passed right after my daughter was born. I remember the day my grandmother died. Earlier in the day she sat in a lawn chair holding my infant daughter while watching me work on my car. Later that night I got a call from my Mom telling me that my Grandma had died.

I dreamt that I was viewing my Grandmother in her death bed with a person holding a baby next to the bed. It was like viewing a painting through thin gauze, but my Grandmother was moving and the person holding the baby was comforting her by telling her that this was the resurrection of life.

So you see I know that we have an after-life or a life-forever… enjoy your today-life, and please forgive me if you believe I am being blasphemous… I do believe!