For the entry tonight has to do with the subject of time.

You see, I'm ...better.

Is there, and will there always be an ache, a void, where Jamie was in my life? Of course. Yet it's not weighing on me the way it once did. Everything I do doesn't remind me of Jamie.

I miss him.

I just can get on with my life more now. It's not an everpresent pain. It's not anything anybody did. It's not anything anybody said.

It was just the inevitable passing of time.

Time is, in one sense, just a direction. Like width, bredth, and length, it's a way of determining where something is. Even if you define where something is in its exact position, unless you include time, your directions are useless. I was waiting for someone at work last Friday at 4:30, but I wouldn't be waiting there now....

Yet it's unlike all other directions in that I can't move along it at will. I can't go to yesterday, the same way I can go to a suburb of Nashville. I can't go to tomorrow. I can't even look that way. I'm stuck in the now.

Yet maybe that's for the best, if you think about it.

Suppose I could look in any direction of time I wanted, go into either yesterday or tomorrow. Would I try to go back to when Jamie was alive?

In a second.

Even if every available moment was filled up, as would sooner or later happen, would I turn my vision that way, and want to see Jamie as much as possible?

Of course.

Which of course would mean I would never get over the pain of his loss. (Of course, you can argue there wouldn't be any loss, but the knowledge that I would lose him would always color even my visits to the past.)

Indeed, if I could see the past, I would have been able to see the future. Imagine knowing a doom waited for your son, and you couldn't stop it. (Of course, that presupposes only one future, but unless someone can prove otherwise, that seems a reasonable starting point.)

Or your spouse.

Or yourself.

Imagine knowing the date of your wife's or husband's or lover's death, or your own. Could we live with that calm knowledge, that inevitable fate?

I don't think I could, anyway.

Kurt Vonnegut, in SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, wrote about a man who became "unstuck in time", Billy Pilgrim, and who saw bits of his future or past at any one time. He wrote of the Tramalfordians, who could see all of time as one connected whole, and had no idea of free will.

It made for an interesting alien society, but I couldn't live with that knowledge. Sometimes the uncertainty of the future---and the inattainability of the past---

---Is the only thing that makes the present bearable.

The only thing that lets time heal wounds.

The strangeness of time ----of all the dimensions---may be a merciful blindness, a gift from the Infinite.

There was once a line from Poul Anderson:

"...In the mystery of the cosmos is its very meaning. How I pity immortal God!"

...Sometimes, just sometimes, I know what he means.

Of how it's a mercy we're not.... omniscient.