What Historical Wormholes Can Teach You About Life

Amen

Okay, Jesus probably didn’t ride through town on a dinosaur (except in Woodward, OK).

But did you know that woolly mammoths were still roaming Russia during the construction of the Pyramids of Giza?

You see, our perception of time is just that — our perception.

Time flies in our daily lives.

We look back and wonder where the last 10 years went.

But don’t despair. Even whole epochs of history are not immune to time.

And nowhere is that more apparent than when we consider the concept of a “human wormhole” — when a single person links two disparate eras.

For example, Oliver Wendell Holmes who lived to be 93, shook the hands of both the 6th US president, John Quincy Adams and the 35th, John F. Kennedy.

However, events can also create these links, so I think a more accurate term is “historical wormhole.”

Here are some more examples:

Historical Wormholes Through 1900

• Rome was founded closer to our time (27 BC) than to the completion of the Pyramids (roughly 2500 BC) and equidistant between our time and the last woolly mammoths
• Oxford University began lessons in 1096, over 300 years before the Aztec Empire was founded in 1428
• George Washington never knew dinosaurs existed as he died before the first fossils were scientifically recognized as an extinct animal species
• The fax machine was invented in 1843 whilst wagons crossed the Oregon Trail

Historical Wormholes Over the Recent Past

• The first Millennials were born during the Cold War
• The last publicly identified widow of a Civil War vet, Maudie Hopkins, died in 2008 — the same year Barack Obama was elected president
• Vince Carter of the Atlanta Hawks, has played in four of the nine decades that the NBA has existed
• Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl five years before the iPhone was released
• Timothée Chalamet was born one year after Amazon was founded. Damn you, Chalameeeet!!!

And Then There Are the More “Cosmic” Wormholes

• 1% of white noise from your television is actually microwaves from the initial explosion of the Big Bang
• Humans are not the end result of the Big Bang like we often perceive. The Big Bang is still exploding and expanding. In reality, we’re just the current iteration of it, like everything that has come and gone in the last 13.8 billion years or will come and go in the billions of years ahead
• Each living organism on Earth is the result of an unbroken line of organisms surviving long enough to pass on their genes for over 4 billion years in a row. That’s a helluva win streak!

What These Wormholes Teach Us About Life

Time is subjective and we either forget or never learn about pretty astounding facts and relationships between even the most significant events and people in history.

Everything we do and experience in our lives will eventually be forgotten or at least it won’t have the same significance to others as it has to us.

This can seem terrifying and pointless, but there is another way to see it. Instead, it can be liberating. It means there’s no need for you to try to maintain your ego.

It means that you can do anything, be anything, try anything in life that you want. You can fail and make mistakes and no one will remember or care. Even those who might try to put you down will be gone in the blink of an eye.

We are coloring on a blank slate and when we’re gone, it will be wiped clean again.

Each of us only occupies a minute time in space until the particles that are melded together to make us, separate and go on to meld with other particles to create other things.

The time we have is precious because it’s rare.

But at the same time, it’s not precious at all because it’s just a drop in a huge ocean of time.

So make the most of your own drop of time, because it’s the only one you’ll get. Whether that’s through leisure or work or whatever makes life good for you.

But don’t be precious with your drop of time as if you’re going to preserve it. You aren’t. So go hard and be bold because it will make you feel way more alive. You really have nothing to fear as any mistakes or failures you have will just fade into the immense ocean of time along with everything else.

— — — — — — — —

This article is Day 11 of the 30-Day Fishbowl Series

You can start the series by clicking HERE.